Proposal and Evaluation of a Rendezvous-based Adaptive Communication Protocol for Large-scale Wireless Sensor Networks

Recently, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have attracted attentions of many researchers since they can be used for wide range of applications such as environmental monitoring, security, disaster prevention, environmental control in office buildings, and precision agriculture. Control mechanisms for WSNs should adapt to a variety of communication patterns which reflect application requirements and the situation. In this paper, we propose ARCP (Ant-based rendezvous communication protocol), a novel communication protocol for WSNs. ARCP is designed to be adaptive to a variety of communication patterns by taking the rendezvous-based approach, where sensor data are collected and delivered through nodes marked as rendezvous points. At the same time, ARCP acquires robustness to failures and scalability with respect to network size by adopting AntHocNet, which is an ad-hoc routing protocol inspired by foraging behavior of ants. Through simulation experiments, we show that ARCP outperforms existing communication protocols in adaptability, robustness, and scalability.