Reliable Message Routing Protocol for Periodic Messages on Wireless Sensor Networks

In industrial distributed control systems, a sensor periodically collects a physical value from the environment and transmits it to an actuator, which performs a control action based on the value received from the sensor. For stable control operation, those messages from sensors to actuators have to be transmitted reliably end-to-end. This paper proposes a reliable message routing protocol for periodic messages on a wireless sensor network which guarantees a specified end-to-end target packet reception rate. For reliable message transmission for periodic traffic, the proposed protocol first finds paths with end-to-end packet reception rate higher than the target packet reception rate and chooses a path with the highest end-to-end packet reception rate among them, and transmits data packets periodically through the path after setting up a path. To maintain the target packet reception rate in the proposed protocol, the destination node monitors periodically its actual packet reception rate and transmits a feedback control message to the source if its reception rate drops below the target value. If the source node receives the feedback message, it sets up a new reliable path with end-to-end packet reception rate higher than the target packet reception rate. The performance of the proposed protocol has been analyzed by simulation using QualNet simulator. The simulation result has shown that the proposed protocol has a better packet reception rate than the previous routing protocols and maintains a target packet reception rate in a network where the amount of traffic changes dynamically.