A multi-hop implicit routing protocol for sensor networks

The broadcast communication paradigm is in prevalent use to facilitate data acquisition in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). However, broadcasting simply by flooding results in serious redundancy. This paper proposes a location-information-free and flooding-like routing protocol for WSNs, called throw and drowned (T&D) flooding protocol. This protocol is a multi-hop implicit routing protocol. Packets are propagated without knowing the network topologies and without establishing prior routes. In addition, T&D is an energy saving protocol. It uses link-layer-relaying instead of network-layer-forwarding to propagate packets to the sink, which saves energy costs on next-hop selection and route establishment. It is also capable of switching the sensor node into sleep mode for the purpose of power saving. T&D is designed for applications with dynamic topology changes and scalable WSNs and can be used instead of pure flooding in existing WSNs. The performance of the proposed protocol is simulated and compared with the pure flooding and gossiping protocols, the well-known implicit routing protocols used in WSNs.