R3E: Reliable reactive routing enhancement for wireless sensor networks

Providing reliable and efficient communication under fading channels is one of the major technical challenges in wireless sensor networks (WSNs), especially in industrial WSNs (IWSNs) with dynamic and harsh environments. In this work, we present the Reliable Reactive Routing Enhancement (R3E) to increase the resilience to link dynamics for WSNs/IWSNs. R3E is designed to enhance existing reactive routing protocols to provide reliable and energy-efficient packet delivery against the unreliable wireless links by utilizing the local path diversity. Specifically, we introduce a biased backoff scheme during the route-discovery phase to find a robust guide path, which can provide more cooperative forwarding opportunities. Along this guide path, data packets are greedily progressed toward the destination through nodes' cooperation without utilizing the location information. Through extensive simulations, we demonstrate that compared to other protocols, R3E remarkably improves the packet delivery ratio, while maintaining high energy efficiency and low delivery latency.