Routing with off-network control: a novel paradigm for scalable design in very large sensor networks

  • Authors:

  • Tao Wu;Subir Biswas

  • Affiliations:

  • Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, Michigan State University, East Lansing, USA;Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, Michigan State University, East Lansing, USA

  • Venue:
  • Wireless Networks
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

This paper presents a novel architectural solution to address the problem of scalable routing in very large sensor networks. The control complexities of the existing sensor routing protocols, both flat and with traditional hierarchy, do not scale very well for large networks with potentially hundreds of thousands of embedded sensor devices. This paper develops a novel routing solution Off-Network Control Processing (ONCP) that achieves control scalability in large sensor networks by shifting certain amount of routing functions "off-network". This routing approach, consisting of "coarse grain" global routing, and distributed "fine grain" local routing is proposed for achieving scalability by avoiding network-wide control message dissemination. We present the ONCP architectural concepts and analytically characterize its performance in relation to both flat and traditional hierarchical sensor routing architectures. We also present ns2-based experimental results which indicate that for very large networks, the packet drop, latency and energy performance of ONCP can be significantly better than those for flat sensor routing protocols such as Directed Diffusion and cluster-based traditional hierarchical protocols such as CBRP.