The Use of Scalable Source Routing for Networked Sensors
Thomas T. Fuhrmann · 2005
Routing in sensor networks is a demanding task. Neither do the nodes have sufficient processing and memory resources to perform sophisticated routing algorithms like e.g. Dijkstra; nor do they have sufficient bandwidth and energy to revert to simple routing approaches like e.g. flooding. Moreover, the network topologies lack wellcrafted structures that might simplify routing e.g. by the introduction of hierarchies. In this paper, we briefly present a novel routing algorithm, scalable source routing (SSR), which is capable of memory and message efficient routing in networks with ’random topology’. This algorithm enables sensor networks to use recent peer-to-peer mechanisms from the field of overlay networks, like e.g. distributed hash tables and indirection infrastructures. Unlike other proposals along that direction, SSR integrates all necessary routing tasks into one simple, highly efficient routing protocol. Simulations demonstrate that in a small-world network with more than 100 000 nodes, SSR requires each node to only store routing data for 255 other nodes to establish routes between arbitrary pairs of nodes. These routes are on average only about 20-30 % longer than the globally optimal path between these nodes. 1.