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Wenlong Chen 1 and Zhe Zheng 1 and Rong Xiao 2 and Fan Li 3 and Zhenzhen Sun 1
Academic Editor:Yonghe Liu
1, College of Information Engineering, Capital Normal University, Beijing 100048, China
2, College of Information Science and Technology, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875, China
3, School of Computer Science, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing 100081, China
Received 14 August 2015; Accepted 29 September 2015; 28 October 2015
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
1. Introduction
Wireless sensor network (WSN) has greatly contributed to the progress of health care, environmental monitoring, and other fields. Since sensor node or transmission link failure often happens, the stability of data transmission is a great concern in WSNs. Generally, transmission link failure may influence WSN topologies, which would result in the change of some nodes' IP addresses and forwarding paths. Routing protocol for low power and lossy networks (RPL) [1] is the most popular routing protocol in WSN, which builds a Destination Oriented Directed Acyclic Graph (DODAG) of sensor nodes. In RPL, node failure will lead to the rejoining of some related nodes to DODAG and thereby long waiting for route convergence and recovery.
In this paper, we propose a highly reliable forwarding model based on virtual nodes (HRVN). In HRVN, we assume physical sensor nodes construct a tree topology. A VN consists of several neighboring physical sensor nodes, which have the same parent node and children nodes. Under normal conditions, the physical sensor nodes belonged to the same VN share the forwarding task of packets from or to descendants. In a VN, when a sensor node is out of work, the others would take over its work immediately. Moreover, the internal changes of a VN are transparent to its parent and children.
The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 summarizes the related work and HRVN is briefly introduced in Section 3. Section 4 presents design details of the VN, which is the key element in HRVN. Then data transmission and self-healing is described in Section 5, followed by experiments and simulations in Section 6. Finally, Section 7 concludes the...