Biologically Inspired Self Selective Routing with Preferred Path Selection

Abstract

This paper presents a biologically inspired routing protocol called Self Selective Routing with preferred path selection (SSRP). Its operation resembles the behavior of a biological ant that finds a food source by following the strongest pheromone scent left by scout ants at each fork of a path. Likewise, at each hop of a multi-hop path, a packet using the Self Selective Routing (SSR) protocol moves to the node with the shortest hop distance to the destination. Each intermediate node on a route to the destination uses a transmission back-off delay to select a path to follow for each packet of a flow. Neither an ant nor a packet knows in advance the route that each will follow as it is decided at each step. Therefore, when a route becomes severed by a failure, they can dynamically and locally adjust their routing to traverse the shortest surviving path. Preferred path selection reduces transmission delay by essentially removing back-off delay for the node that carried the previous packet of the same flow. The results reported here for both simulation and execution of a MicaZ mote implementation, show that this is an efficient and fault-tolerant protocol with small transmission delay, high reliability and high delivery rate.

Research was sponsored by US Army Research laboratory and the UK Ministry of Defence and was accomplished under Agreement Number W911NF-06-3-0001. The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the authors, and should not be interpreted as representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of the US Army Research Laboratory, the U.S. Government, the UK Ministry of Defense, or the UK Government. The US and UK Governments are authorized to reproduce and distribute reprints for Government purposes notwithstanding any copyright notation hereon.