A Tiny and Efficient Wireless Ad-hoc Protocol for Low-cost Sensor Networks

Abstract

The authors introduce a simple ad-hoc routing scheme that operates in the true spirit of ad-hoc networking, i.e., in a modeless fashion, without neighborhood discovery or explicit point-to-point forwarding, while offering a high (and tunable) degree of reliability, fault-tolerance and robustness. Being aimed at truly tiny devices (e.g., with 1KB of RAM), the scheme can automatically take advantage of extra memory resources to improve the quality of routes for critical nodes. In contrast to some popular low-cost solutions, like ZigBeetrade the approach involves a single node type and exhibits lower resource requirements. The presented scheme has been verified in an industrial deployment with stringent quality of service requirements