Flow Driven Routing in Ad Hoc Sensor Networks

Ad hoc sensor networks are usually composed of a large number of tiny sensors that have limited capabilities. One of the important problems in these networks is how the packets are routed to their destinations. The answer to this question should be provided locally in each node for the sake of energy conservation and scalability. However, we can not always make the best decision without any global information of the network. Considering these, we propose a Flow Driven Routing method which inspiring by the maximum flow concept, estimates the global status of the network. The global information leads to a better decision making, and the experimental results show that the total number of packets that can be routed is increased by 8.1% with respect to one of the best existing methods. This value for the networks with big holes and lower density can reach up to 17%.

Keywords:

Ad hoc sensor networks , routing , maximum flow