Scalable landmark flooding: a scalable routing protocol for WSNs

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are about to become a popular and inexpensive tool for all kinds of applications. More advanced applications also need end-to-end routing, which goes beyond the simple data dissemination and collection mechanisms of early WSNs. The special properties of WSNs -- scarce memory, CPU, and energy resources -- make this a challenge. The Dynamic Address Routing protocol (DART) could be a good candidate for WSN routing, if it were not so prone to link outages. In this paper, we propose Scalable Landmark Flooding (SLF), a new routing protocol for large WSNs. It combines ideas from landmark routing, flooding, and dynamic address routing. SLF is robust against link and node outages, requires only little routing state, and generates low maintenance traffic overhead.