Design And Implementation Of Routing Protocols In Wireless Sensor Networks For Equipments Monitoring

A wireless sensor network (WSN) is typically a system consisting of resource-constrained micro sensor nodes that self-organize into a multi-hop wireless network. Wireless sensor networks have wide applications such as environment monitoring, medical care, space exploration, etc. Equipments monitoring is an important application area of WSN. This paper investigates the design and implementation issues of routing protocols in WSNs for applications of equipments monitoring.In WSNs, routing protocols are with responsibility for managing and maintaining the paths which are used to transfer data between sensor nodes and sink node, and play an important role in high-efficient information transfer in WSNs. Constrained by several limitations, such as limited resources on sensor nodes and the interfering in wireless communication environment, design an efficient routing protocols for WSNs is not easy, it's necessary to consider many factors such as energy-conserving, robust and so on. In this paper, we first survey the main routing protocols in WSNs, then give a briefly classification and comparison to these protocols, and we introduces the evaluation parameters of protocols and simulating tools.TinyOS, which is specifically designed for WSNs, is one of the most popular open-source operating system. MintRoute is the default routing protocol in TinyOS. It implements a simple but high-efficient routing protocol with the traditional shortest-path-first mechanism. This paper analyzes the component model and the core routing algorithm. By adding new mechanisms such as selective update sending and electing equivalent fathers in turn, it implements a new energy-efficient routing protocol called MintRouteEE, which overcomes the lacks of energy-efficiency and traffic uniform distribution in MintRoute. The results of experiments indicated that with no affection on routing performance, MintRouteEE does better in conserving energy comparing to MintRoute.Against the traits of the equipments monitoring application, this paper designs and implements a traffic control routing protocol called TCR, which features with high reliability and high energy-efficiency,. TCR divides the nodes in the networks into different levels according to their distances from sink node. There is no manager in a level and every node undertakes the same work, namely data receiving and relaying. TCR provides simple but effective mechanism to cope with the problems such as routing update, path failure, which are caused by nodes failure. TCR also provides reliable transmission in network layer, which guarantees the persistence of the important data. TCR provides two data delivery models to the sink. One is sending to the up-level nodes in turns which could balance traffic distribution and maximize the network lifetime. The other is the best path first, which could enhance the speed of sending back. The second mode suits the application such as query-response which seldom appears but needs real-time.In our lab, we have deployed an experimental environment constructed by Micaz nodes, and did several tests for TCR. We have validated that each mechanism of our design scheme in TCR could cope with the corresponding problems. Especially, the protocol has prominent performance in conserving energy and maximizing the network lifetime. The result shows that TCR can meet the requirements of the project.