ABSTRACT
Routing p lays a n i mportant ro le i n w ired n etworks, w ireless n etworks, and mobile a d hoc networks (M ANETs), w hich at tracted a l arge number o f studies i n t he pa st. H owever, d ue to t he u nique c onstraints a nd ap plication requirements i n WSN s, t he ro uting sc hemes de veloped fo r t he I nternet a nd the M ANET a re often not fe asible or c annot de liver promising performance as needed in WSNs. For example, most Internet routing protocols assume
highly reliable wired l inks with very low bit error rates, while M ANET routing solutions are normally optimized for highly mobile nodes with symmetric links between neighbors. However, these assumptions are not true for WSNs. While f acing t he c hallenges a risen f rom t he w ireless en vironment a nd l inks such a s M ANETs o r w ireless L ANs, routing sc hemes i n WSN s a lso h ave to consider unique issues, including limited resources (such as energy, bandwidth, and computing), lossy wireless links and fault tolerance, data aggregation and data reporting, node deployment, scalability, coverage, network dynamics, and node/link heterogeneity [Njamal04].
