Route duration improvement in wireless sensor and actuator networks based on mobility parameters and flooding control

Abstract

Mobility of nodes is one of the main causes of broken links in wireless networks. Although several theoretical models for links and routes selection have been proposed in the literature, so far little effort has been made to apply them to the existing routing protocols. In this article, a decision tree has been incorporated in a reactive routing protocol in order to select the most long-lived routes. The decision tree is based on nodes' mobility parameters typically considered by the theoretical models, such as distance between nodes, relative speed, and nodes' directions. The flooding techniques used within the routing protocols for the routing discovery procedures cause a massive usage of control packets which in turn has negative impact on the performance of the networks. So, an improved flooding control is presented in this article that enhances the performance of the proposed route selection based on a decision tree, in turn reducing overheads and the power consumption caused by the control packets. These two proposed approaches have been implemented over a widely used reactive routing protocol such as Ad Hoc On-Demand Distance Vector (AODV) to obtain performance results using Network Simulator 2 simulation tool. The performances of the proposed approaches have been compared with that of the AODV implementation in terms of general performance and path duration. The simulation results show that the proposed route selection significantly improves the results of AODV. © 2012 Reina et al.