Grid-based Multi-path with Congestion Avoidance Routing (GMCAR) Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

A new routing protocol that handles real-time and non-real time applications in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) is proposed. We employ the idea of dividing the sensor network field into grids. Inside each grid, one of the sensor nodes is selected as a master node which is responsible for delivering the data generated by any node in that grid and for routing the data received from other master nodes in the neighbor grids. For each master node, multiple paths that connect the master node to the sink are stored as routing entries in the routing table of that node. These paths are the diagonal paths between the sink and the master node. In case of congestion occurrence, a novel congestion control mechanism is also proposed in order to relieve the congested areas. Simulation results have shown that our proposed protocol has the capability to extend the lifetime of the sensor network and to utilize the available storage.