A lightweight routing protocol for Industrial Wireless Sensor and Actuator Networks

The applications of Industrial Wireless Sensor and Actuator Networks (IWSAN) are time-critical and subject to strict requirements in terms of end-to-end delay and reliability of data delivery. A notable shortcoming of the existing wireless industrial communication standards is the existence of overcomplicated routing protocols, whose adequacy for the intended applications is questionable. This paper evaluates the potentials of flooding as a data dissemination technique in IWSANs. The concept of flooding is recycled by introducing minimal modifications to its generic form and compared with a number of existing WSN protocols, in a variety of scenarios. The simulation results of all scenarios observed show that our lightweight approach is able to meet stringent performance requirements for networks of considerable sizes. Furthermore, it is shown that this solution significantly outperforms a number of conventional WSN routing protocols in all categories of interest.