FRCA: A Novel Flexible Routing Computing Approach for Wireless Sensor Networks

In wireless sensor networks, routing protocols with immutable network policies lacking the flexibility are generally incapable of maintaining desired performance due to the complicated and changeable environment situations and application requirements. The proposed “Flexible Routing Computing Approach (FRCA)” is a novel distributed and probabilistic computing approach capable of modifying or upgrading routing policies on the fly with low cost, which effectively enhances the flexibility of routing protocols. FRCA models the routing metric as a forwarding probability distribution for routing decisions. This model depends on three elements, the physical quantities collected at sensor nodes, the built-in base math functions, and the routing parameters. These elements are all user-oriented and can be specified to implement multifarious complicated network policies meeting different performance requirements. More significantly, through distributing routing parameters from the sink to end nodes, operators are allowed to adjust network policies on the fly without the interruption of network services. Through extensive performance evaluation studies and simulations, the results demonstrated that routing protocols designed based on FRCA could achieve better performance compared to its state-of-the-art counterparts regarding network lifetime, energy consumption, and duplicate packets as well as ensure high flexibility during network policies modification or upgrade.