Interference and Congestion Aware Gradient Broadcasting Routing for Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract: This paper addresses the problem of reliable transmission of data through a sensor network. We focus on networks rapidly deployed in harsh environments. For these networks, important design requirements are fast data transmission and rapid network setup, as well as minimized energy consumption for increased network lifetime. We propose a novel broadcasting solution that accounts for the interference impact and the congestion level of the channel, in order to improve robustness, energy consumption and delay performance, compared to a benchmark routing protocol, the GRAB algorithm. Three solutions are proposed: P-GRAB, a probabilistic routing algorithm for interference mitigation, U-GRAB, a utility-based algorithm that adjusts to real-time congestion and UP-GRAB, a combination of P-GRAB and U-GRAB. It is shown that P-GRAB provides the best performance for geometry-aware networks while the U-GRAB approach is the best option for unreliable and unstable networks.