Efficient Route Update and Maintenance for Reliable Routing in Large-Scale Sensor Networks

Reliable data transmissions are challenging in industrial wireless sensor networks as channel conditions change over time. Rapid changes in channel conditions require accurate estimation of the routing path performance and timely update of the routing information. However, this is not well fulfilled in existing routing approaches. Addressing this problem, this paper presents combined global and local update processes for efficient route update and maintenance, and incorporates them with a hierarchical proactive routing framework. While the global process updates the routing path with a relatively long period, the local process with a shorter period checks potential routing path problems. A theoretical modeling is developed to describe the processes. Through simulations, the presented approach is shown to reduce end-to-end delay up to 30 times for large networks, while improving packet reception ratio (PRR) in comparison with hierarchical and proactive routing protocols ROL/NDC, DSDV, and DSDV with IPv6 Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy Networks' Trickle algorithm. Compared with reactive routing protocols AODV and Ad Hoc On-demand Multipath Distance Vector, it provides similar PRR while reducing end-to-end delay over 15 times.