Multi-modal routing to tolerate failures

Reactive routing protocols such as AODV (Ad-hoc On-demand Distance Vector routing) are commonly used routing algorithms in WSNs and use route discovery broadcast packet to establish route or recover from link failure. However, frequent route discovery can aggravate the congested network. Retransmission technique has been proposed in Not So Tiny (NST) AODV to reduce the number of route discoveries due to short sporadic link failure at the cost of memory consumption and packet delay. To address these issues, we propose a distributed Multi-mode Routing Protocol (MRP) that automatically switches between routing protocols (AODV and NST-AODV) in real time. Incorporating a timing-based route selection mechanism has reduced the numbers of routing packets generated. Results from extensive simulations have shown significant improvement on packet delivery ratio and power consumption with MRP.