A Network Conditions Aware Geographical Forwarding Protocol for Real-Time Applications in Mobile Wireless Sensor Networks

This paper presents a new routing protocol named RACE (netwoRk conditions Aware geographiCal forwarding protocol for rEal-time applications in mobile wireless sensor networks) that was developed to address the challenges found while using WSNs in a running competition scenario: QoS, mobility, and high workload. RACE aims to provide QoS requirements to the application layer by giving priority to real-time messages and also by handling network congestions. Routing is performed node-by-node, where each node calculates a score to choose the best node to forward the message. The main feature of our protocol is to also consider network conditions for calculating the score. Our simulation experiments show that RACE presents excellent performance in respect to message delivery ratio (up to 95%) and deadline miss ratio (7% in the worst case). For instance, we compared RACE with a well known protocol and observed that it outperformed this protocol in both metrics.