Geographical QoS-Oriented Protocol for Environmental Sensor Networks

Environmental sensor networks (ESNs) is an emerging application specific wireless sensor network (WSNs). ESNs support the activities required to characterize and monitor the quality of the environment, allowing the connection of a wide variety of measuring devices. Due to the specifics of environmental monitoring applications, ESNs should meet a set of requirements, in particular, system integration, content routing and reliability. In this context, geographic protocols appear as an important option in which packets are routed to a destination based not on its identity or address but on its geographic position. Geographic protocols are particularly useful for ESN because they allow queries to be routed to regions instead of specific nodes identified by their addresses. In this paper we propose a geographic protocol capable to forward interest queries across multiple paths, allowing the discovery and maintenance of communication paths formed by good quality transmission links. We demonstrated that the proposed protocol is capable to find good quality paths to in ESNs, presenting good performance even in scenarios where the network is submitted to severe variations in the quality of the wireless links.