IGF: A State-Free Robust Communication Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are being designed to solve a gamut of interesting real-world problems. Limitations on available energy and bandwidth, message loss, high rates of node failure, and communication restrictions pose challenging requirements for these systems. Beyond these inherent limitations, both the possibility of node mobility and energy conserving protocols that power down nodes introduce additional complexity to routing protocols that depend on up to date routing or neighborhood tables. Such state-based protocols suffer excessive delay or message loss, as system dynamics require expensive upkeep of these tables. Utilizing characteristics of high node density and location awareness, we introduce IGF, a location-aware routing protocol that is robust and works without knowledge of the existence of neighboring nodes (state-free). We compare our work against established routing protocols to demonstrate the efficacy of our solution when nodes are mobile or periodically sleep to conserve energy. We show that IGF far outperforms these protocols, in some cases delivering close to 100% of the packets transmitted while alternate solutions fail to even find a path between a source and destination. Specifically, we show that our protocol demonstrates a vast improvement over prior work using metrics of delivery ratio, control overhead, and end-to-end delay.