Robustness of Receiver-Driven Multi-hop Wireless Network with Soft-State Connectivity Management

Energy saving and ensuring robust data collection are the big subjects in realization of wireless sensor networks. In the intermittent receiver-driven data transmission (IRDT) protocol, which aims to save energy and get high reliability, communication between nodes commences when multiple receiver nodes transmit their own IDs intermittently and a sender node receives them. In this paper, we focused on the analogy between this periodic ID-transmission and a periodic message in the soft-state management. Soft state is often considered to have robustness against failures, therefore, we introduce it to IRDT for constructing a robust network. We propose a soft-state management of routing tables in IRDT, where each node uses the periodic ID-transmission not only for communication but also for update of a routing table. By computer simulation, we show that IRDT can achieve a 43.5% improvement in robustness against a sink node failure. Moreover, we show that the receiver-driven asynchronous intermittent transmission protocol suits for the soft-state management through comparison with the sender-driven asynchronous intermittent transmission protocol.