CARP: A context-aware routing protocol for delay-constrained traffic in sensor networks

In most existing formulations of the problem of routing delay-constrained traffic, two important aspects have been largely overlooked: (i) delays caused by the MAC layer, and (ii) delays caused by packet queuing at the different nodes in a path. While the former aspect has been considered in some recent studies, the latter has yet to be investigated. In this paper, we present CARP, a context-aware protocol for routing delay-constrained traffic in sensor networks. CARP dynamically adapts each node´s routing behavior to the current context of that node, i.e., its own routing load as well as the routing load of other nodes in its neighborhhod. We implemented CARP on top of TinyOS and conducted several experiments that confirmed CARP´s efficiency in terms of routing delay-constrained traffic.