A gradient‐based multiple‐path routing protocol for low duty‐cycled wireless sensor networks

Routing in a low duty-cycled wireless sensor network (WSN) has attracted much attention recently because of the challenge that low duty-cycled sleep scheduling brings to the design of efficient distributed routing protocols for such networks. In a low duty-cycled WSN, a big problem is how to design an efficient distributed routing protocol, which uses only local network state information while achieving low end-to-end (E2E) packet delivery delay and also high packet delivery efficiency. In this paper, we study low duty-cycled WSNs wherein sensor nodes adopt pseudorandom sleep scheduling for energy saving. The objective of this paper is to design an efficient distributed routing protocol with low overhead. For this purpose, we design a simple but efficient hop-by-hop routing protocol, which integrates the ideas of multipath routing and gradient-based routing for improved routing performance. We conduct extensive simulations, and the results demonstrate the high performance of the proposed protocol in terms of E2E packet delivery latency and packet delivery efficiency as compared with existing protocols. Copyright (c) 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.