The Multipath On-demand Routing (MOR) protocol is a protocol to connect nodes in
wireless sensor network
Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) refer to networks of spatially dispersed and dedicated sensors that monitor and record the physical conditions of the environment and forward the collected data to a central location. WSNs can measure environmental c ...
s. It is an
ad hoc routing protocol
An ad hoc routing protocol is a convention, or standard, that controls how nodes decide which way to route packets between computing devices in a mobile ad hoc network.
In ad hoc networks, nodes are not familiar with the topology of their netw ...
which is
reactive or
on-demand, meaning that it establishes routes as needed. The advantage of this approach is obvious if only a few routes are needed, since the routing overhead is less compared to the proactive approach of establishing routes whether or not they are needed. The disadvantage of on-demand establishment of routes is that connections take more time if the route needs to be established.
MOR lessens the disadvantages of on-demand routing in wireless sensor networks by having the likely targets of communication perform an initial broadcast. This allows all recipients to have a route to these nodes.
The main characteristic distinguishing MOR from other ad hoc routing protocols is that it maintains multiple routes to each destination, when available, whereas most other such protocols only keep a single route. There are many advantages to having multiple routes when possible, including
* increased
reliability
Reliability, reliable, or unreliable may refer to:
Science, technology, and mathematics Computing
* Data reliability (disambiguation), a property of some disk arrays in computer storage
* High availability
* Reliability (computer networking), ...
* potentially better
load balancing
* more even energy consumption (a consequence of better load balancing)
Each node in MOR remembers all next-hop nodes that are closer to a given destination for which a route exists. It then sends successive packets to each such node in
round-robin fashion. If a next-hop node fails to acknowledge a given packet, the retransmission is attempted to another node, again if possible. This allows automatic and graceful recovery from occasional localized
congestion as well as longer-term reasons for node unavailability.
External links
A Reliability Layer for Ad Hoc Wireless Sensor Network Routing
Ad hoc routing protocols