Fast and Reliable Route Maintenance Protocols for WSN with Crash and Intermittent Failures

In this paper, we consider the problem of route maintenance in unstable networks to realize a low latency, highly reliable message delivery in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). In WSNs, each sensor node may suddenly stall due to crash and/or battery drain and the wireless links between adjacent nodes are not reliable enough. Thus, a route maintenance algorithm for WSNs should tolerate both of crash and intermittent failures. In the following, we first analyze various existing algorithms with respect to the latency and the reliability. We then evaluate the performance of those algorithms via simulations. As a conclusion, we will show that a combination of those different types of failures affect the performance of the route maintenance algorithm in a different way from the case of single type of failures.