Design of a burst-link-aware routing protocol in wireless sensor networks

Delivering the packets on an end-to-end reliable path with high efficiency in wireless sensor networks is challenging because of the highly dynamic and unpredictable bursty wireless links. In this paper, we describe a burst-link-aware routing protocol, called BLAR, for wireless sensor networks, which has three salient features. First, it discusses the impact of bursty links on routing protocol performance, and exploits an efficient burstiness identification method (BIM) to identify the existence of the bursty links by passively measuring the RSSI (received signal strength indicator) value of packets received from neighbours. Second, BLAR presents a timely and adaptive link quality estimator, named EasiLQE, which uses error-based filter and takes account into the bursty links identification. Finally, it proposes a direction-aware route establishment (DARE) strategy that uses EasiETX routing metric to establish route based on EasiLQE. We have evaluated the BLAR on our 8-node Telosb testbed, and discussed its performance benefits in comparison to the CTP, a well-established, well-tested, and widely used data collection protocol that is part of the TinyOS2.1 release. The experiment results have shown that the BLAR can provide highly reliable data collection while achieves an average of 17.3% reduction of cost compared to CTP in indoor environment, and 17.5% in outdoor environment, and a maximum of 45.4% reduction of beacon cost in outdoor environment.