A traffic-based local gradient maintenance protocol: Making gradient broadcast more robust

Abstract

Gradient broadcast routing is a robust scheme for data gathering in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). At each hop, the sender broadcasts the packet to its neighbors and one or more nodes among its neighbors closer to the sink forward it. As long as a node has at least one neighbor with a smaller hop-count, it can route packets. Nevertheless, nodes can disappear because of energy depletion, hardware failure, etc. In this case, it cannot be ensured that a packet reaches the sink. Usually this issue is addressed by updating the gradient with a periodical flooding. Nevertheless, it consumes an important amount of energy, moreover, parts of the network may not need to be updated. In this paper, we propose GRABUP (GRAdient Broadcast UPdate), a traffic-based gradient maintenance algorithm which updates the gradient thanks to the data packets. We simulate the proposition and compare it with the classic gradient broadcast routing. © 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland.