Distributed delay minimization in stochastic routing for wireless sensor networks

Improving the packet transmission delay is one of the major challenges of stochastic routing in wireless sensor networks: the use of random paths from source to destination nodes results in longer routes on average, which is not desirable in delay-sensitive applications. In this paper, we propose a novel distributed and decentralized stochastic routing algorithm to minimize the average packet transmission delay of the network. We also provide an analytical expression for the average packet transmission delay for a circular network using a discrete time Markov chain model and we discuss the performance improvement with respect to random walking methods. Simulation results demonstrate that our proposed routing method significantly improves the average packet transmission delay when compared to existing methods and provides a near optimal solution.