Maximizing packet delivery ratio in stochastic routing: An analytical perspective

Stochastic routing offers a promising substitute to deterministic routing in wireless sensor networks, mainly due to its randomized nature. Still, most of the stochastic routing algorithms are heuristic, while the optimality for a given degree of randomness is difficult to find. In this paper, we propose a theoretical framework to find the optimal stochastic routing policy that maximizes the packet delivery ratio for a given degree of randomness in routing. Our model consists of directed acyclic networks with unreliable communication links. The degree of randomness is quantified by the global entropy of routing. By employing the Lagrangian approach, a simple iterative algorithm to find the optimal stochastic routing policy is proposed. This can be used as a benchmark for performance comparison of stochastic routing algorithms.

[1]  Sergio D. Servetto,et al.  Constrained random walks on random graphs: routing algorithms for large scale wireless sensor networks , 2002, WSNA '02.

[2]  John N. Tsitsiklis,et al.  Introduction to Probability , 2002 .

[3]  Mohamed F. Younis,et al.  A survey on routing protocols for wireless sensor networks , 2005, Ad Hoc Networks.

[4]  Sylvie Perreau,et al.  Fault-tolerant stochastic routing for wireless sensor networks with unreliable links , 2013, 2013 Australian Communications Theory Workshop (AusCTW).

[5]  JAMAL N. AL-KARAKI,et al.  Routing techniques in wireless sensor networks: a survey , 2004, IEEE Wireless Communications.

[6]  S. Perreau,et al.  Load balancing effect of stochastic routing in wireless sensor networks , 2012, Australasian Telecommunication Networks and Applications Conference (ATNAC) 2012.

[7]  Nicos Christofides,et al.  Graph theory: An algorithmic approach (Computer science and applied mathematics) , 1975 .

[8]  François Fouss,et al.  Randomized Shortest-Path Problems: Two Related Models , 2009, Neural Computation.

[9]  S. Albayrak,et al.  Stochastic Routing in Wireless Sensor Networks , 2009, 2009 IEEE International Conference on Communications Workshops.

[10]  João Pedro Hespanha,et al.  Game Theoretic Stochastic Routing for Fault Tolerance and Security in Computer Networks , 2007, IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems.

[11]  Kenneth Dixon,et al.  Introduction to Stochastic Modeling , 2011 .

[12]  Charles M. Grinstead,et al.  Introduction to probability , 1999, Statistics for the Behavioural Sciences.

[13]  Biswanath Mukherjee,et al.  Wireless sensor network survey , 2008, Comput. Networks.

[14]  Ian F. Akyildiz,et al.  Wireless sensor networks: a survey , 2002, Comput. Networks.