Title: M2RC: Multiplicative-increase/additive-decrease Multipath Routing
Control for Wireless Sensor Networks

Authors: Hany Morcos, Ibrahim Matta, and Azer Bestavros

Date: July 14, 2004

Abstract:

Routing protocols in wireless sensor networks (WSN) face
two main challenges: first, the challenging environments in
which WSNs are deployed negatively affect the quality of
the routing process. Therefore, routing protocols for WSNs
should recognize and react to node failures and packet losses.
Second, sensor nodes are battery-powered, which makes
power a scarce resource. Routing protocols should optimize
power consumption to prolong the lifetime of the WSN. In
this paper, we present a new adaptive routing protocol for
WSNs, we call it M2RC. M2RC has two phases: mesh establishment
phase and data forwarding phase. In the first
phase,M2RC establishes the routing state to enable multipath
data forwarding. In the second phase, M2RC forwards data
packets from the source to the sink. Targeting hop-by-hop
reliability, an M2RC forwarding node waits for an acknowledgement
(ACK) that its packets were correctly received at
the next neighbor. Based on this feedback, an M2RC node
applies multiplicative-increase/additive-decrease (MIAD) to
control the number of neighbors targeted by its packet broadcast.
We simulated M2RC in the ns-2 simulator and
compared it to GRAB, Max-power, and Min-power routing
schemes. Our simulations show that M2RC achieves
the highest throughput with at least 10-30 percent less consumed
power per delivered report in scenarios where a certain number
of nodes unexpectedly fail.