Enhanced reliable reactive routing (ER3) protocol for multimedia applications in 3D wireless sensor networks

Sensor networks designed especially for the multimedia applications require high data rate and better Quality of Service (QoS). Offering a reliable and energy efficient routing technique in a harsh and complex three-dimensional (3-D) environment for multimedia applications is a challenging job. Geo-routing and geometric routing have been efficient routing schemes for two-dimensional (2-D), but are unable to work properly for 3-D sensor networks. In order to enhance the resilience to link the dynamics in the 3-D sensor network, in this research an Enhanced Reliable Reactive Routing (ER3) is proposed. ER3 is an advancement to the existing reactive routing schemes, to provide energy efficient and reliable routing of data packets in the complex 3-D sensor networks for multimedia applications. The major attraction of ER3 is its backoff scheme, which occurs in the route discovery phase. In backoff scheme robust pilot paths formed between the source and destination are calculated to enable cooperative forwarding of the data packets. The data packets in ER3 are forwarded greedily to the destination from the source and doesn’t require any prior location information of the nodes. The encompassing simulations suggest that the ER3 outperforms the existing routing protocols on the basis of energy efficiency, low latency and high packet delivery ratio.