Efficient route discovery using channel adaptive probabilistic broadcasting in Zigbee wireless sensor networks

Low-Rate Wireless Sensor Networks (LR-WSNs) has become an active area of research in recent decades. ZigBee is a wireless standard based on IEEE 802.15.4 for LR-WSNs. Since in Zigbee networks energy is one of the most vital issues, the routing protocols must be energy efficient. By default, ZigBee uses an Ad hoc On-Demand Distance Vector (AODV) routing protocol. In AODV, broadcasting is the backbone of the route discovery process. Pure flooding is the simplest and most common broadcasting technique for route discovery in AODV routing. The obvious drawback of pure flooding is excessive redundant traffic that degrades the system performance. This is commonly known as broadcast storm problem (BSP). Several schemes have been proposed to address BSP, one of them is the Channel Adaptive Probabilistic Broadcast (CAPB) scheme that adapts the rebroadcast probability dynamically to the current Signal to Interference plus Noise Ratio (SINR) and node density in the neighbourhood. This paper evaluates the CAPB scheme in LR-WSNs based on the IEEE 802.15.4/ZigBee. The CAPB scheme is implemented in the standard AODV routing protocol to replace the pure flooding based broadcast. Extensive ns-2 simulation results show that the CAPB scheme outperforms the standard AODV and the fixed probabilistic broadcasting scheme significantly in terms of routing overhead, throughput, end-to-end delay and energy consumption in noisy LR-WSNs.