An efficient source initiated on-demand data forwarding scheme for wireless sensor networks

A novel approach for an on demand routing protocol using sensor attractiveness-metric (P_a) gradients for the data forwarding decisions is proposed. Attractiveness based routing provides an efficient concept for a data-centric routing in wireless sensor networks. The protocol works on-demand, is source-initiated, has a flat hierarchy and has its origin in the idea of pheromone based routing. During development of the algorithm, the attractiveness-metric was turned into a special factor for link costs and is the sole determinant for data load propagation where the attractiveness level of the sensor node defines its data forwarding attitude. The link costs called ¿attractiveness¿ are calculated from the sensor nodes´ energy status, the current buffer (sensor on board memory) fill level. The received signal strength can also take into account for the attractiveness metric calculation. The algorithm only supports node-to-sink data traffic and therefore is a lightweight approach to generalized multihop routing algorithms in WSNs. The performance evaluation of the proposed protocol is done by extensive simulation using a multi-agent based simulation environment called NetLogo.