ProHet: A Probabilistic Routing Protocol with Assured Delivery Rate in Wireless Heterogeneous Sensor Networks

Due to different requirements in applications, sensors with different capacities are deployed. How to design efficient, reliable and scalable routing protocols in such wireless heterogeneous sensor networks (WHSNs) with intermittent asymmetric links is a challenging task. In this paper, we propose ProHet: a distributed probabilistic routing protocol for WHSNs that utilizes asymmetric links to reach assured delivery rate with low overhead. The ProHet protocol first produces a bidirectional routing abstraction by finding a reverse path for every asymmetric link. Then, it uses a probabilistic strategy to choose forwarding nodes based on historical statistics using local information. Analysis shows that ProHet can achieve assured delivery rate ρ if ρ is set within its upper-bound. Extensive simulations are conducted to verify its efficiency.