Universal Path Tracing for Large-Scale Sensor Networks

Most sensor networks employ dynamic routing protocols so that the routing topology can be dynamically optimized with environmental changes. The routing behaviors can be quite complex with increasing network scale and environmental dynamics. Knowledge on the routing path of each packet is certainly a great help in understanding the complex routing behaviors, allowing effective performance diagnosis and efficient network management. We propose PAT, a universal sensornet path tracing approach. PAT includes an intelligent path encoding scheme that allows efficient decoding at the PC side. To make PAT more scalable, we propose techniques to accurately estimate the degree information by exploiting timing information, allowing more compact path encoding. Moreover, we employ subpath concatenation to infer excessively long paths with a high recovery probability. We propose an analytical model to quantify the benefits of PAT with varying network scale, network density, routing dynamics and packet delivery performance. We evaluate PAT's performance using testbed experiments, trace-driven study, and extensive simulations. Results show that PAT significantly outperforms existing approaches.