Fast neighbor join and link breakage detection for METX-based routing in wireless sensor networks

In this paper, we present fast neighbor join and fast link breakage detection schemes to enhance the minimal expected transmission (METX)-based routing scheme reported recently (Woo et al. (2003)). Current METX-based routing scheme uses a link estimator named window mean with exponential weighted moving average (WMEWMA) (Woo et al. (2003)), which is relatively slow in neighbor join and delete, thus affecting the way the network adapts to the dynamic of links. To solve this problem, we propose a fast neighbor join and a fast link breakage detection scheme. The fast join scheme can turn on the links with good quality rapidly while the fast link breakage detection scheme shortens the time to identify the broken link. Through extensive simulation we show that the two schemes work well together with the WMEWMA estimator and therefore improve the performance of routing in a dynamic environment.