TREE: Routing strategy with guarantee of QoS for industrial wireless sensor networks

As considerable progress has been made in wireless sensor networks (WSNs), we can expect that sensor nodes will be applied in industrial applications. Most available techniques for WSNs can be transplanted to industrial wireless sensor networks (IWSNs). However, there are new requirements of quality of service (QoS), that is, real-time routing, energy efficiency, and transmission reliability, which are three main performance indices of routing design for IWSNs. As one-hop neighborhood information is often inadequate to data routing in IWSNs, it is difficult to use the conventional routing methods. In the paper, we propose the routing strategy by taking the real-time routing performance, transmission reliability, and energy efficiency (TREE, triple R and double E) into considerations. For that, each sensor node should improve the capability of search range in the phase of data route discovery. Because of the increase of available information in the enlarged search range, sensor node can select more suitable relay node per hop. The real-time data routes with lower energy cost and better transmission reliability will be used in our proposed routing guideline. By comparing with other routing methods through extensive experimental results, our distributed routing proposal can guarantee the diversified QoS requirements in industrial applications. Copyright (c) 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.