Fault-tolerant Stochastic Routing for Wireless Sensor Networks with Unreliable Links

Timely and reliable delivery of critical information is vital for military applications and disaster relief applications. Such applications rely on communications networks, which in practice operate via unreliable links. Improving the packet delivery ratio while reducing the end-to-end delay is a major challenge for stochastic routing in networks with unreliable communication links. In this paper, we propose a novel decentralized stochastic routing algorithm to improve the packet delivery ratio and end-to-end delay for wireless sensor networks (WSNs) with unreliable links. We introduce an evaluation framework based on discrete time absorbing Markov chains to evaluate the packet delivery ratio and end-to-end delay. Simulation results show that our proposed routing algorithm performs significantly better in terms of packet delivery ratio and end-to-end delay when compared to existing decentralized methods.