Designing efficient routing protocol for heterogeneous sensor networks

Most existing routing protocols consider homogeneous sensor networks, i.e., all sensor nodes have the same capabilities in terms of communication, computation, energy supply, etc. However, a homogeneous ad hoc network suffers from poor performance and scalability. Recent research has demonstrated its performance bottleneck both theoretically and through simulation experiments and testbed measurement. Furthermore, nodes in certain sensor networks are heterogeneous. In this paper, we propose to improve network performance by deploying heterogeneous sensor nodes. We design a novel routing protocol-heterogeneous sensor routing (HSR) for heterogeneous sensor networks. The performance of HSR is evaluated through extensive simulation experiments. Our results show that HSR performs better than two popular routing protocols-directed diffusion and mesh.