Joint Technology and Route Selection in Multi-RAT Wireless Sensor Networks with RODENT

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) are limited by the characteristics of the Radio Access Technologies (RAT) their are based on. We call a wireless multi-hop network composed of nodes able to use several RAT a Multiple Technologies Network (MTN). Nodes must manage the RAT and route selection, in a local and distributed way, with an suitable communication protocol stack. Nodes may share multiple common RAT with multiple neighbors. Thus the devices' heterogeneity of technologies has to be taken into account by each of the stack's layer. In this article, we introduce our custom Routing Over Different Existing Network Technologies protocol (RODENT), designed for MTN. It is capable of dynamically (re)selecting the best RAT and route based on data requirements evolving over time. RODENT is based on a multi-criteria route selection via a custom lightweight TOPSIS method from our previous work [1]. For an evaluation of performance, we implemented a functional prototype of RODENT on Pycom FiPy devices. Results show that RODENT enables multiple data requirements support and energy savings, while increasing effective coverage.