M2RC: multiplicative-increase/additive-decrease multipath routing control for wireless sensor networks

Routing protocols in wireless sensor networks (WSN) face two main challenges: first, the challenging environments in which WSN's are deployed negatively affect the quality of the routing process. Therefore, routing protocols for WSN's should recognize and react to node failures and packet losses. Second, sensor nodes are battery-powered, which makes power a scarce resource. Routing protocols should optimize power consumption to prolong the lifetime of the WSN. In this paper, we present a new adaptive routing protocol for WSN's, we call it M2RC. M2RC has two phases: mesh establishment phase and data forwarding phase. In the first phase, M2RC establishes the routing state to enable multipath data forwarding. In the second phase, M2RC forwards data packets from the source to the sink. Targeting hop-by-hop reliability, an M2RC forwarding node waits for an acknowledgement (ACK) that its packets were correctly received at the next neighbor. Based on this feedback, an M2RC node applies multiplicative-increase/additive-decrease (MIAD) to control the number of neighbors targeted by its packet broadcast. We simulated M2RC in the ns-2 simulator [4] and compared it to GRAB [1], Max-power, and Min-power routing schemes. Our simulations show that M2RC achieves the highest throughput with at least 10-30% less consumed power per delivered report in scenarios where a certain numberof nodes unexpectedly fail.-