QoSNET: An integrated QoS network for routing protocols in large scale wireless sensor networks

Numerous QoS routing strategies focus on end-to-end delays to provide time constrained routing protocols in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). With the arrival of wireless multimedia sensor networks, traffic can be composed of time sensitive packets and reliability-demanding packets. In such situations, some works also take into account link reliability to provide probabilistic QoS. The trade-off between the guarantee of the QoS requirements and the network lifetime remains an open issue, especially in large scale WSNs. This paper proposes a promising multipath QoS routing protocol based on a separation of the nodes into two sub-networks: the first part includes specific nodes that are occasionally involved in routing decisions, while the remaining nodes in the second sub-network fully take part in them. The QoS routing is formulated as an optimization problem that aims to extend the network lifetime subject to QoS constraints. Using the percolation theory, a routing algorithm is designed to solve the problem on the respective sub-networks. Simulation results show the efficiency of this novel approach in terms of average end-to-end delays, on-time packet delivery ratio, and network lifetime.