Multi-Gradient Routing Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Sensor networks tend to support different traffic patterns since more and more emerging applications have diverse needs. We present MGRP, a Multi-Gradient Routing Protocol for wireless sensor networks, which is fully distributed and efficiently supports end-to-end, one-to-many and many-to-one traffic patterns by effectively construct and maintain a gradient vector for each node. We further combine neighbor link estimation with routing information to reduce packet exchange on network dynamics and node failures. We have implemented MGRP on TinyOS and evaluated its performance on real-world testbeds. The result shows MGRP achieves lower end-to-end packet delay in different traffic patterns compared to the state of the art routing protocols while still remains high packet delivery ratio.