Formal Study of Routing Protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks

NORA (Network rOle-based Routing Algorithm) and NORIA (Network rOle-based Routing Intelligent Algorithm) are novel routing algorithms for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), which combine various effective techniques in order to reduce energy consumption and improve data routes. NORA is an algorithm, which uses local and neighbourhood information to assign a role to each node on the net, whereas NORIA adds a fuzzy logic engine to NORA in order to improve this assignment. These algorithms are far from being trivial, and, therefore, there is a clear need for the use of formal methods to check their correctness and performance, prior to their deployment in a real environment. To this end, this paper presents a neat and rigorous study of both algorithms, and, for the sake of completeness, we study and compare also both with a well-known routing protocol: Tree Routing. Finally, Coloured Petri Nets (CPNs) have been chosen as an appropriate modelling language, using the well-known tool, CPNTools, to conduct our experiments.