Price based routing for event driven prioritized traffic in wireless sensor networks

We present a dynamic price based routing protocol in which packets from different applications dynamically choose their paths by evaluating the price to be paid for taking each path and their ability to pay. We propose a mechanism in which the prices reflect congestion on routers and thus the waiting time for packet to pass through the router. These prices increase as usage of the usually preferred shorter routes increases. The packet's ability to pay price on a router is defined by the product of application's priority and the delay experienced at the router. As a result, the low priority applications intelligently avoid paths with high prices and go via low price routes. The low price routes may possibly be longer but require shorter waiting for passage at congested routers making them faster for low priority packets. This enables high priority traffic to get through quickly via shorter paths as they are able to pay high prices after little wait. Thus, our approach distributes traffic flows of different applications in the network and lowers congestion and delays for all applications. We further show that our dynamic path allocation technique ensures robust communication in fully functional as well as partially damaged networks. Our dynamic pricing mechanism quickly adapts routing to the damaged network, increases utilization of the partial network to lower the impact on critical infrastructure and key resources. Moreover, our proposed mechanism is equally applicable to both communication networks and physical infrastructure networks.