SOFROP: Self-organizing and fair routing protocol for wireless networks with mobile sensors and stationary actors

Wireless sensor and actor networks (WSAN) have become increasingly popular in recent years. The cooperative operation between sensor and actor nodes results in a major advantage against pure sensor networks and extends the range of possible application scenarios. One emerging application is the Amazon scenario in which stationary actors are deployed at accessible points in a thick forest structure and sensor nodes are thrown in a river flowing through the forest to gather observations from unreachable areas of the forest. This unprecedented and unique setting exposes two important challenges: (a) the dynamics of the river forms a continuously varying topology of sensor nodes requiring a highly adaptive network organization and (b) the inherent features of sensor and actor nodes, combined with rapid changes in the link structure of the network require efficient bandwidth utilization and data transmission. In this paper, we address these challenges by introducing SOFROP, a novel self-organizing and fair routing protocol for WSANs. The extensive simulations that are carried out for evaluation point out two highlights of SOFROP. These are the lightweight and efficient routing that is optimized for fairness and the locally acting adaptive overlay network formation.