Biologically inspired self selective routing with preferred path selection

Abstract

This paper presents a biologically inspired routing protocol called Self Selective Routing with preferred path selection (SSRP). Its operation resembles the behavior of a biological ant that finds a food source by following the strongest pheromone scent left by scout ants at each fork of a path. Likewise, at each hop of a multi-hop path, a packet using the Self Selective Routing (SSR) protocol moves to the node with the shortest hop distance to the destination. Each intermediate node on a route to the destination uses a transmission back-off delay to select a path to follow for each packet of a flow. Neither an ant nor a packet knows in advance the route that each will follow as it is decided at each step. Therefore, when a route becomes severed by a failure, they can dynamically and locally adjust their routing to traverse the shortest surviving path. Preferred path selection reduces transmission delay by essentially removing back-off delay for the node that carried the previous packet of the same flow. The results reported here for both simulation and execution of a MicaZ mote implementation, show that this is an efficient and fault-tolerant protocol with small transmission delay, high reliability and high delivery rate. © 2008 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.