On-demand QoS routing protocol for IP-based sensor networks

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) have emerged as a chief catalyst to accelerate ubiquitous era by deploying diverse kinds of nodes with various sensors to collect information and providing us with a convenient and intelligent service at any time. However, they are mostly adapted and tailored to specific applications in a localized and unstandardized way meaning it is difficult to form a global infrastructure; therefore, IP-based approaches have recently been expected to solve those conventional problems of legacy wireless sensor networks. In the future, IP-based sensor networks may be deployed anywhere around us as well as places paid attentions from the sensor network literature and served just like the current Internet. Numerous types of sensor network applications may be demanded for different purposes coexisting in the same PAN. From this point of view, there have been little considerations on routing protocols reflecting different applications`` routing requirements in IP-based sensor networks. In this thesis, we propose an on-demand routing strategy facilitating the sum of weighted cost on selected metrics to satisfy different applications`` routing needs. When sensor nodes initiate their path preferences, defined as services, distributed and shared in a commissioning process by the gateway on an on-demand basis, route discovery processes find the preferred paths for them. Once the routes found, data packets marked with the service are forwarded to-wards destinations by intermediate nodes. Unlike the existing on-demand routing protocols, a router node maintains route entries in a route table by the pair of a destination and service; thereby, different paths for different applications can be utilized. From the performance evaluation, we show the use of diverse weight configurations on metrics takes more advantages of increase in reliability, energy efficiency, and load balancing than the use of a single weight assignment.