Prohet, Layhet, and Egyhet: Routing Protocols with Assured Delivery Rates in Wireless Heterogeneous Sensor Networks

Abstract

Due to requirements in different applications, sensors with various characteristics are deployed. Data routing in such heterogeneous wireless sensor networks (HWSNs) poses challenges. First, the heterogeneous features create asymmetric links in the communication graphs which are not dealt with by conventional routing algorithms using undirected graphs. Second, it is required to have an assured delivery rate for mission critical applications even with sensors communicating with each other through lossy asymmetric links. In this thesis, we propose ProHet, LayHet, and EgyHet which take advantage of asymmetric links to deliver messages to the sink with an assured delivery rate. To show the advantage of the proposed protocols, we compare them with the existing performance-guaranteed protocol by simulation. The simulation results show that ProHet, LayHet, and EgyHet outperform previous routing methods in terms of average delivery ratio, average hops, average packet replication and average control message overhead. As sensor energy is consumed, the performance of LayHet and EgyHet eventually degrades more slowly than that of ProHet.