Controlling Route Discovery for Efficient Routing in Resource-Constrained Sensor Networks

Existing ad-hoc network routing strategies base their operations on flooding route requests throughout the network and choosing the shortest path thereafter. However, this typically results in a large number of unnecessary transmissions, which could be expensive for resource-constrained nodes such as those in a sensor network. In this paper, we propose a new mechanism HopAlert which optimizes route establishment and packet routing by limiting the number of nodes taking part in the route discovery process while achieving a low number of hops establishment. Using analysis and simulations, we show that this results in more routes with shorter hop counts than a reactive flooding protocol such as AODV while achieving higher savings.