P-Zone: Connectivity-based packet path tracing in wireless sensor networks

In large-scale Wireless sensor networks (WSNs), the network status is complex and unpredictable, which brings great challenges to practical network design and management. Tracing the route path of each data packet in the network is an important way to observe network behaviors and understand network dynamics. However, tracing the full route path of each packet could be highly challenging, due to the hard resource constraint in WSNs. Our previous work proposes a hash-based path tracing mechanism, and leverages network connectivity and node locations to reduce the computational complexity. However, the node locations may be unavailable in some scenarios. In this work, we further propose a location-free enhancement to the hash-based path tracing mechanism, called P-Zone. P-Zone requires only network connectivity information to reduce the computational complexity. Theoretical analysis and practical simulations are conducted to evaluate the effectiveness and performance of our design. The results indicate that P-Zone can significantly reduce the computational complexity of the hashbased path tracing mechanism, while effectively tracing the full route path of each packet in the network in a real-time manner, and outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.