Question

Discuss issues pertaining routing algorithm in Wireless Sensor Networks. State and describe three routing algorithms with relevant example of their applications.

Answer 1

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The design task of routing protocols for WSN is quite challenging because of multiple characteristics, which differentiate them, from wireless infrastructure-less networks. Several types of routing challenges involved in wireless sensor networks. Some of important challenges are mentioned below:

• It is almost difficult to allocate a universal identifiers scheme for a big quantity of sensor nodes. So, wireless sensor motes are not proficient of using classical IP-based protocols.

• The flow of detected data is compulsory from a number of sources to a specific base station. But this is not occurred in typical communication networks.

• The created data traffic has significant redundancy in most of cases. Because many sensing nodes can generate same data while sensing. So, it is essential to exploit such redundancy by the routing protocols and utilize the available bandwidth and energy as efficiently as possible.

QoS based routing protocols

To get good Quality of Service these protocols are used. QoS aware protocols try to discover path from source to sink that satisfies the level of metrics related to good QoS like throughput, data delivery, energy and delay, but also making the optimum use of the network resources.

Examples are

• Sequential assignment routing (SAR)

• SPEED

• Multi path and Multi SPEED (MMSPEED)

Query based routing protocol

These type of routing protocols are mostly receiver-initiated. The sensor nodes will only send data in response to queries generated by the destination node. The destination node sends query of interest for receiving some information through the network and the target node sense the information and send back to the node that has initiated the request. The examples are:

• Sensor protocols for information via negotiation (SPIN)

• Directed diffusion (DD)

• COUGAR

Multi-path routing protocol

Multi-path routing protocols provide multiple paths for data to reach the destination providing load balancing, low delay and improved network performance as a result. The multiple routing protocol also provide alternate path in case of failure of any path. Dense networks more interested in multiple path networks. To keep the paths alive some sort of periodic messages have to a send after some specific intervals hence multiple path routing is not more energy efficient. Multipath routing protocols are:

• Multi path and Multi SPEED (MMSPEED)

• Sensor protocols for information via negotiation (SPIN)

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