Introduction

The mobile ad-hoc networking community has proposed a wide range of protocols for unicast and multicast routing through mobile wireless devices. Many of these protocols have been studied only under simulation using simplistic radio models, and do not consider issues such as bandwidth or memory limitations. In contrast, the sensor network community has demanded solutions that work on hardware with limited resources, with a focus on routing through stationary nodes to a single base station. Still, several emerging sensor network applications involve mobile nodes with communication patterns requiring any-to-any routing topologies. We should be able to build upon the MANETs work to implement these systems. We have implemented one such protocol, Adaptive demand-Driven Multicast Routing (ADMR), on CC2420-based motes using the TinyOS operating system. ADMR was chosen because it supports multicast communication, a critical requirement for many pervasive and mobile applications. Translating ad-hoc networking protocols into real implementations on resource-limited sensor nodes raises a number of challenges. Through extensive measurement on a 30-node sensor network testbed, we identify problems with the original protocol design and propose solutions to make ADMR suitable for networks of resource limited devices. Please see our papers for the performance of TinyADMR under a wide range of conditions. We highlight the real-world impact of path selection metrics, radio asymmetry, protocol overhead, and limited routing table size. Delivery ratio of ADMR using MIN-HOP, MAX-LQI, PATH-DR metrics

Papers, Slides, and Photographs

Ad-Hoc Multicast Routing on Resource-Limited Sensor Nodes, Bor-rong Chen, Kiran-Kumar Muniswamy-Reddy and Matt Welsh. In Proceedings of the Second ACM/Sigmobile workshop on Multi-hop Ad Hoc Networks: from theory to reality (REALMAN'06), Florence, Italy, May 2006. (pdf) Lessons Learned from Implementing Ad-Hoc Multicast Routing in Sensor Networks, Bor-rong Chen, Kiran-Kumar Muniswamy-Reddy and Matt Welsh. Harvard University Technical Report TR-22-05, November,2005. (pdf)

Software Release

This version is developed for TinyOS 1: TinyADMR-1.1.tar.gz

People

Faculty: Prof. Matt Welsh, Harvard University Students and Staff: Bor-rong Chen, Harvard University Kiran-Kumar Muniswamy-Reddy, Harvard University