The most critical routing-related issue of wireless sensor network (WSNs) is the quality of the underlying links. While most routing protocols are formulated in a graphtheoretical manner, it is often by no means clear which sensor nodes are connected by a wireless link. Links fluctuate in reliability and can have relatively high packet error rates. Using flooding-based protocols over such links can result in rather convoluted routing tables where nodes are considered to be neighbors only because a flooding packet happened to go through despite actually poor link quality. To overcome these problems, the proposed routing scheme advocate a careful selection of actual parents for a routing tree toward the base station, using information that the link layer can provide. In addition, the determined routes evidently influence the lifetime of the network. Hence, the proposed routing scheme goes a step further in that it attempts to provide guarantee on the lifetime of the network. The initial experimental results, on Crossbow’s Mica2 sensor nodes, show that the proposed routing scheme achieves an overall average of over 30% energy savings over the standard network layer provided by TinyOS, i.e., MintRoute and achieves greater than 60% connectivity to neighboring nodes and communication reliability. Particularly, it shows a higher success rate of packet delivery and moderate energy consumption.
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