Anycast Q-routing in wireless sensor networks for healthcare monitoring

Wireless healthcare monitoring sensor networks are multi-hop Zigbee-based systems which usually use broadcast or multicast to reliably deliver vital diagnostics information or event detection to the sink. However, such schemes typically lead to high network traffic and large path search delay. This paper presents an efficient, adaptive, distributed routing mechanism, called anycast Q-routing to route information to the nearest sink in multiple sink wireless sensor networks (WSNs). The proposed scheme requires only local information at each node, modest computational, storage, and learning overhead. Simulation results show that the anycast Q-routing scheme can discover paths using low communication overhead and short path search latency over existing AODV-based broadcast, multicast and anycast schemes used in WSNs for healthcare monitoring.