Multipath Routing in Wireless Sensor Networks: A Survey and Analysis
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paper_title: Wireless sensor network survey

paper_content:

A wireless sensor network (WSN) has important applications such as remote environmental monitoring and target tracking. This has been enabled by the availability, particularly in recent years, of sensors that are smaller, cheaper, and intelligent. These sensors are equipped with wireless interfaces with which they can communicate with one another to form a network. The design of a WSN depends significantly on the application, and it must consider factors such as the environment, the application's design objectives, cost, hardware, and system constraints. The goal of our survey is to present a comprehensive review of the recent literature since the publication of [I.F. Akyildiz, W. Su, Y. Sankarasubramaniam, E. Cayirci, A survey on sensor networks, IEEE Communications Magazine, 2002]. Following a top-down approach, we give an overview of several new applications and then review the literature on various aspects of WSNs. We classify the problems into three different categories: (1) internal platform and underlying operating system, (2) communication protocol stack, and (3) network services, provisioning, and deployment. We review the major development in these three categories and outline new challenges.
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paper_title: a high-throughput path metric for multi-hop wireless routing

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This paper presents the expected transmission count metric (ETX), which finds high-throughput paths on multi-hop wireless networks. ETX minimizes the expected total number of packet transmissions (including retransmissions) required to successfully deliver a packet to the ultimate destination. The ETX metric incorporates the effects of link loss ratios, asymmetry in the loss ratios between the two directions of each link, and interference among the successive links of a path. In contrast, the minimum hop-count metric chooses arbitrarily among the different paths of the same minimum length, regardless of the often large differences in throughput among those paths, and ignoring the possibility that a longer path might offer higher throughput.This paper describes the design and implementation of ETX as a metric for the DSDV and DSR routing protocols, as well as modifications to DSDV and DSR which allow them to use ETX. Measurements taken from a 29-node 802.11b test-bed demonstrate the poor performance of minimum hop-count, illustrate the causes of that poor performance, and confirm that ETX improves performance. For long paths the throughput improvement is often a factor of two or more, suggesting that ETX will become more useful as networks grow larger and paths become longer.
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paper_title: Experimental study of concurrent transmission in wireless sensor networks

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We undertake a systematic experimental study of the effects of concurrent packet transmissions in low-power wireless networks. Our measurements, conducted with Mica2 motes equipped with CC1000 radios, confirm that guaranteeing successful packet reception with high probability in the presence of concurrent transmissions requires that the signal-to-interference-plus-noise-ratio (SINR) exceed a critical threshold. However, we find a significant variation of about 6 dB in the threshold for groups of radios operating at different transmission powers. We find that it is harder to estimate the level of interference in the presence of multiple interferers. We also find that the measured SINR threshold generally increases with the number of interferers. Our study offers a better understanding of concurrent transmissions and suggests richer interference models and useful guidelines to improve the design and analysis of higher layer protocols.
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paper_title: Performance Optimization Using Multipath Routing in Mobile Ad Hoc and Wireless Sensor Networks

paper_content:

Multipath routing has been a promising technique in MANETs and WSNs. It has been shown through both theoretical analysis and simulation results that multipath routing provides many performance benefits, including improved fault tolerance, security, and reliability, improved routing efficiency and reduced routing overhead, more balanced traffic load and energy consumption, reduced end-to-end latency, and aggregated network bandwidth, etc. Significant research efforts have been made and are continuously being made in developing multipath routing protocols and multipath packet forwarding techniques in order to achieve the above-mentioned performance gains effectively and efficiently. Nevertheless, many issues that are directly related to the application of multipath routing remain untouched, such as the integration of the multipath routing into the current single-path routing paradigm, the synchronization of the packets among the multiple paths, and the interfaces of multipath routing protocols to other layers of protocol in the network protocol stack, etc.
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paper_title: Survey of multipath routing protocols for mobile ad hoc networks

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This survey investigates multipath routing protocols for mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). The main objectives of multipath routing protocols are to provide reliable communication and to ensure load balancing as well as to improve quality of service (QoS) of MANETs. These multipath protocols are broadly classified into five categories based on their major goals. The goals are to improve delay, provide reliability, reduce overhead, maximize network life and support hybrid routing. Multipath routing protocols address issues such as multiple paths discovery and maintaining these paths. Issues, objectives, performances, advantages and disadvantages of these protocols are investigated and summarized. A checklist is provided as a guideline so that a network designer can choose an appropriate multipath routing protocol to meet the network's application objectives.
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paper_title: Alleviating Congestion Using Traffic-Aware Dynamic Routing in Wireless Sensor Networks

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The congestion problem in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is quite different from that in traditional networks. Most current congestion control algorithms try to alleviate the congestion by reducing the rate at which the source nodes inject packets into the network. However, this traffic control scheme always decreases the throughput so as to violate fidelity level required by the application. In this paper, we present a solution that sufficiently exert the idle or under-loaded nodes to alleviate congestion and improve the overall throughput. To achieve this goal, a traffic-aware dynamic routing(TADR) algorithm is proposed to route packets around the congestion areas and scatter the excessive packets along multiple paths consisting of idle and under-loaded nodes. Enlightened by the concept of potential in common physics, our TADR algorithm is designed through constructing a mixed potential field using depth and normalized queue length to force the packets to steer clear of obstacles created by congestion and eventually move towards the sink. The simulation results show that our solution achieves its objectives and improves the overall throughput by around 370% as compared to the benchmark routing protocol. Furthermore, our TADR has low overhead suitable for large scale dense sensor networks.
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paper_title: Upstream congestion control in wireless sensor networks through cross-layer optimization

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Congestion in wireless sensor networks not only causes packet loss, but also leads to excessive energy consumption. Therefore congestion in WSNs needs to be controlled in order to prolong system lifetime. In addition, this is also necessary to improve fairness and provide better quality of service (QoS), which is required by multimedia applications in wireless multimedia sensor networks. In this paper, we propose a novel upstream congestion control protocol for WSNs, called priority-based congestion control protocol (PCCP). Unlike existing work, PCCP innovatively measures congestion degree as the ratio of packet inter-arrival time along over packet service time. PCCP still introduced node priority index to reflect the importance of each sensor node. Based on the introduced congestion degree and node priority index, PCCP utilizes a cross-layer optimization and imposes a hop-by-hop approach to control congestion. We have demonstrated that PCCP achieves efficient congestion control and flexible weighted fairness for both single-path and multi-path routing, as a result this leads to higher energy efficiency and better QoS in terms of both packet loss rate and delay.
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paper_title: Performance Optimization Using Multipath Routing in Mobile Ad Hoc and Wireless Sensor Networks

paper_content:

Multipath routing has been a promising technique in MANETs and WSNs. It has been shown through both theoretical analysis and simulation results that multipath routing provides many performance benefits, including improved fault tolerance, security, and reliability, improved routing efficiency and reduced routing overhead, more balanced traffic load and energy consumption, reduced end-to-end latency, and aggregated network bandwidth, etc. Significant research efforts have been made and are continuously being made in developing multipath routing protocols and multipath packet forwarding techniques in order to achieve the above-mentioned performance gains effectively and efficiently. Nevertheless, many issues that are directly related to the application of multipath routing remain untouched, such as the integration of the multipath routing into the current single-path routing paradigm, the synchronization of the packets among the multiple paths, and the interfaces of multipath routing protocols to other layers of protocol in the network protocol stack, etc.
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paper_title: Directed diffusion: a scalable and robust communication paradigm for sensor networks

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Advances in processor, memory and radio technology will enable small and cheap nodes capable of sensing, communication and computation. Networks of such nodes can coordinate to perform distributed sensing of environmental phenomena. In this paper, we explore the directed diffusion paradigm for such coordination. Directed diffusion is datacentric in that all communication is for named data. All nodes in a directed diffusion-based network are application-aware. This enables diffusion to achieve energy savings by selecting empirically good paths and by caching and processing data in-network. We explore and evaluate the use of directed diffusion for a simple remote-surveillance sensor network.
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paper_title: Energy efficient and QoS based routing protocol for wireless sensor networks

paper_content:

The increasing demand for real-time applications in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) has made the Quality of Service (QoS) based communication protocols an interesting and hot research topic. Satisfying Quality of Service (QoS) requirements (e.g. bandwidth and delay constraints) for the different QoS based applications of WSNs raises significant challenges. More precisely, the networking protocols need to cope up with energy constraints, while providing precise QoS guarantee. Therefore, enabling QoS applications in sensor networks requires energy and QoS awareness in different layers of the protocol stack. In many of these applications (such as multimedia applications, or real-time and mission critical applications), the network traffic is mixed of delay sensitive and delay tolerant traffic. Hence, QoS routing becomes an important issue. In this paper, we propose an Energy Efficient and QoS aware multipath routing protocol (abbreviated shortly as EQSR) that maximizes the network lifetime through balancing energy consumption across multiple nodes, uses the concept of service differentiation to allow delay sensitive traffic to reach the sink node within an acceptable delay, reduces the end to end delay through spreading out the traffic across multiple paths, and increases the throughput through introducing data redundancy. EQSR uses the residual energy, node available buffer size, and Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) to predict the best next hop through the paths construction phase. Based on the concept of service differentiation, EQSR protocol employs a queuing model to handle both real-time and non-real-time traffic. By means of simulations, we evaluate and compare the performance of our routing protocol with the MCMP (Multi-Constraint Multi-Path) routing protocol. Simulation results have shown that our protocol achieves lower average delay, more energy savings, and higher packet delivery ratio than the MCMP protocol.
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paper_title: Reliable Energy Aware Routing In Wireless Sensor Networks

paper_content:

The main purpose of a sensor network is information gathering and delivery. Therefore, the quantity and quality of the data delivered to the end-user is very important. The immense potential of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) has created a growing awareness of the need for reliability in such networks. A major concern in the design of WSN protocols, including those concerned with reliability, is energy efficiency. In this paper, we present a novel approach to reliability in WSNs. We introduce REAR (Reliable Energy Aware Routing), which is a distributed, on-demand, reactive routing protocol that is intended to provide a reliable transmission environment for data packet delivery. REAR introduces local node selection, path reservation and path request broadcasting delay to provide a reliable transmission environment to reduce retransmissions caused by unstable paths. The scheme efficiently utilizes the limited energy and available memory resources of sensor nodes. REAR attempts to take precaution against errors, instead of finding a solution after encountering the errors. Simulation experiments show that, by deploying an energy reservation scheme, REAR outperforms traditional schemes by establishing an energy-sufficient path from the sink to the source with special path request flooding, and also by distributing the traffic load more evenly in the network.
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paper_title: Energy efficient and QoS based routing protocol for wireless sensor networks

paper_content:

The increasing demand for real-time applications in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) has made the Quality of Service (QoS) based communication protocols an interesting and hot research topic. Satisfying Quality of Service (QoS) requirements (e.g. bandwidth and delay constraints) for the different QoS based applications of WSNs raises significant challenges. More precisely, the networking protocols need to cope up with energy constraints, while providing precise QoS guarantee. Therefore, enabling QoS applications in sensor networks requires energy and QoS awareness in different layers of the protocol stack. In many of these applications (such as multimedia applications, or real-time and mission critical applications), the network traffic is mixed of delay sensitive and delay tolerant traffic. Hence, QoS routing becomes an important issue. In this paper, we propose an Energy Efficient and QoS aware multipath routing protocol (abbreviated shortly as EQSR) that maximizes the network lifetime through balancing energy consumption across multiple nodes, uses the concept of service differentiation to allow delay sensitive traffic to reach the sink node within an acceptable delay, reduces the end to end delay through spreading out the traffic across multiple paths, and increases the throughput through introducing data redundancy. EQSR uses the residual energy, node available buffer size, and Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) to predict the best next hop through the paths construction phase. Based on the concept of service differentiation, EQSR protocol employs a queuing model to handle both real-time and non-real-time traffic. By means of simulations, we evaluate and compare the performance of our routing protocol with the MCMP (Multi-Constraint Multi-Path) routing protocol. Simulation results have shown that our protocol achieves lower average delay, more energy savings, and higher packet delivery ratio than the MCMP protocol.
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paper_title: MMSPEED: multipath Multi-SPEED protocol for QoS guarantee of reliability and. Timeliness in wireless sensor networks

paper_content:

In this paper, we present a novel packet delivery mechanism called Multi-Path and Multi-SPEED Routing Protocol (MMSPEED) for probabilistic QoS guarantee in wireless sensor networks. The QoS provisioning is performed in two quality domains, namely, timeliness and reliability. Multiple QoS levels are provided in the timeliness domain by guaranteeing multiple packet delivery speed options. In the reliability domain, various reliability requirements are supported by probabilistic multipath forwarding. These mechanisms for QoS provisioning are realized in a localized way without global network information by employing localized geographic packet forwarding augmented with dynamic compensation, which compensates for local decision inaccuracies as a packet travels towards its destination. This way, MMSPEED can guarantee end-to-end requirements in a localized way, which is desirable for scalability and adaptability to large scale dynamic sensor networks. Simulation results show that MMSPEED provides QoS differentiation in both reliability and timeliness domains and, as a result, significantly improves the effective capacity of a sensor network in terms of number of flows that meet both reliability and timeliness requirements up to 50 percent (12 flows versus 18 flows).
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paper_title: Multiconstrained QoS multipath routing in wireless sensor networks

paper_content:

Sensor nodes are densely deployed to accomplish various applications because of the inexpensive cost and small size. Depending on different applications, the traffic in the wireless sensor networks may be mixed with time-sensitive packets and reliability-demanding packets. Therefore, QoS routing is an important issue in wireless sensor networks. Our goal is to provide soft-QoS to different packets as path information is not readily available in wireless networks. In this paper, we utilize the multiple paths between the source and sink pairs for QoS provisioning. Unlike E2E QoS schemes, soft-QoS mapped into links on a path is provided based on local link state information. By the estimation and approximation of path quality, traditional NP-complete QoS problem can be transformed to a modest problem. The idea is to formulate the optimization problem as a probabilistic programming, then based on some approximation technique, we convert it into a deterministic linear programming, which is much easier and convenient to solve. More importantly, the resulting solution is also one to the original probabilistic programming. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.
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paper_title: An efficient N-to-1 multipath routing protocol in wireless sensor networks

paper_content:

A typical task in a wireless sensor network is that every sensor node senses its local environment and, upon request, sends the data of interest back to a base station. Based on this many-to-one communication pattern, we first propose a distributed N-to-1 multipath discovery protocol which distinguishes from other multipath routing protocols in that it is able to find multiple node-disjoint paths from every sensor node to the base station simultaneously in one route discovery process. Then we propose a hybrid multipath data collection scheme which combines end-to-end multipath traffic dispersion and per-hop alternate path salvaging. Our simulation results show that the proposed N-to-1 multipath discovery protocol is highly efficient and the hybrid data collection scheme based on it provides a seamlessly more reliable and more secure data collection service in wireless sensor networks
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paper_title: a high-throughput path metric for multi-hop wireless routing

paper_content:

This paper presents the expected transmission count metric (ETX), which finds high-throughput paths on multi-hop wireless networks. ETX minimizes the expected total number of packet transmissions (including retransmissions) required to successfully deliver a packet to the ultimate destination. The ETX metric incorporates the effects of link loss ratios, asymmetry in the loss ratios between the two directions of each link, and interference among the successive links of a path. In contrast, the minimum hop-count metric chooses arbitrarily among the different paths of the same minimum length, regardless of the often large differences in throughput among those paths, and ignoring the possibility that a longer path might offer higher throughput.This paper describes the design and implementation of ETX as a metric for the DSDV and DSR routing protocols, as well as modifications to DSDV and DSR which allow them to use ETX. Measurements taken from a 29-node 802.11b test-bed demonstrate the poor performance of minimum hop-count, illustrate the causes of that poor performance, and confirm that ETX improves performance. For long paths the throughput improvement is often a factor of two or more, suggesting that ETX will become more useful as networks grow larger and paths become longer.
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paper_title: Energy Constrained Multipath Routing in Wireless Sensor Networks

paper_content:

This paper addresses the issue of Quality of Service (QoS) Routing to improve energy consumption in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Building upon a previously proposed QoS provisioning benchmark model, we formulate the problem of routing sensed information in a WSN network as a path-based energy minimization problem subject to QoS routing constraints expressed in terms of reliability, delay and geo-spatial energy consumption. Using probabilistic approximations, we transform the path-based model into a link-based model and apply methods borrowed from the zero-one optimization framework to solve this problem. By comparing the performance achieved by its solution to the benchmark model, simulation results reveal that our model outperforms the benchmark model in terms of energy consumption and quality of paths used to route the sensed information.
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paper_title: A Survey of QoS Based Routing Protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks

paper_content:

With the increasing demand for real time applications in the Wireless Senor Network (WSN), real time critical events anticipate an efficient quality-of-service (QoS) based routing for data delivery from the network infrastructure. Designing such QoS based routing protocol to meet the reliability and delay guarantee of critical events while preserving the energy efficiency is a challenging task. Considerable research has been focused on developing robust energy efficient QoS based routing protocols. In this paper, we present the state of the research by summarizing the work on QoS based routing protocols that has already been published and by highlighting the QoS issues that are being addressed. The performance comparison of QoS based routing protocols such as SAR, MMSPEED, MCMP, MCBR, and EQSR has also been analyzed using ns-2 for various parameters.
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paper_title: ReInForM: reliable information forwarding using multiple paths in sensor networks

paper_content:

Sensor networks are meant for sensing and disseminating information about the environment they sense. The criticality of a sensed phenomenon determines its importance to the end user. Hence, data dissemination in a sensor network should be information aware. Such information awareness is essential firstly to disseminate critical information more reliably and secondly to consume network resources proportional to the criticality of information. In this paper, we describe a protocol called RelnForM to deliver packets at desired reliability at a proportionate communication cost. RelnForm sends multiple copies of each packet along multiple paths from source to sink, such that data is delivered at the desired reliability. It uses the concept of dynamic packet state in context of sensor networks, to control the number of paths required for the desired reliability, and does so using only local knowledge of channel error rates and topology. We show that for uniform unit disk graphs, the number of edge-disjoint paths between nodes is equal to the average node degree with very high probability. RelnForm utilizes this property in its randomized forwarding mechanism which results in use of all possible paths and efficient load balancing.
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paper_title: Energy-Efficient Multi-path Routing in Wireless Sensor Networks

paper_content:

The paper investigates the usefulness of multi-path routing to achieve lifetime improvements by load balancing and exploiting cross-layer information in wireless sensor networks. Performance gains in the order of 10-15 % could be achieved by altering path update rules of existing on-demand routing schemes. Problems encountered with concurrent traffic along interfering paths have been identified as a direct consequence of special MAC protocol properties.
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paper_title: An Energy-Efficient Multipath Routing Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

paper_content:

The energy consumption is a key design criterion for the routing protocols in wireless sensor networks. Some of the conventional single path routing schemes may not be optimal to maximize the network lifetime and connectivity. In this paper, we propose a distributed, scalable and localized multipath search protocol to discover multiple node-disjoint paths between the sink and source nodes. We also propose a load balancing algorithm to distribute the traffic over the multiple paths discovered. We compare our proposed scheme with the directed diffusion, directed transmission, and the energy-aware routing protocols. Simulation results show that our proposed scheme has a higher node energy efficiency, lower average delay and control overhead than those protocols.
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paper_title: Maximally radio-disjoint multipath routing for wireless multimedia sensor networks

paper_content:

In wireless sensor networks, bandwidth is one of precious resources to multimedia applications. To get more bandwidth, multipath routing is one appropriate solution provided that inter-path interferences are minimized. In this paper, we address the problem of interfering paths in the context of wireless multimedia sensor networks and consider both intra-session as well as inter-session interferences. Our main objective is to provide necessary bandwidth to multimedia applications through non-interfering paths while increasing the network lifetime. To do so, we adopt an incremental approach where for a given session, only one path is built at once. Additional paths are built when requi red, typically in case of congestion or bandwidth shortage. Interference awareness and energy saving are achieved by switching a subset of sensor nodes in a passive state in which they do not take part in the routing process. Despite the routing overhead introduced by the incremental approach we adopt, our simulations show that this can be compensated by the overall achieved throughput and the amount of consumed energy per correctly received packet especially for relatively long sessions such as multimedia ones. This is mainly due to the fact that a small number of non-interfering paths allows for better performances than a large number of interfering ones.
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paper_title: Energy Efficient Collision Aware Multipath Routing for Wireless Sensor Networks

paper_content:

Multipath routing can reduce the need for route updates, balance the traffic load and increase the data transfer rate in a wireless sensor network, improving the utilization of the limited energy of sensor nodes. However, previous multiple path routing methods use flooding for route discovery and transmit data with maximum power regardless of need, which results in waste of energy. Moreover, often a serious problem of collisions among multiple paths arises. In this paper, we propose an energy efficient and collision aware (EECA) node-disjoint multipath routing algorithm for wireless sensor networks. With the aid of node position information, the EECA algorithm attempts to find two collision-free routes using constrained and power adjusted flooding and then transmits the data with minimum power needed through power control component of the protocol. Our preliminary simulation results show that ECCA algorithm results in good overall performance, saving energy and transferring data efficiently.
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paper_title: Interference-Aware Multipath Routing Protocol for QoS Improvement in Event-Driven Wireless Sensor Networks

paper_content:

The existing multipath routing protocols for wireless sensor networks demonstrate the efficacy of traffic distribution over multiple paths to fulfill the Quality of Service (QoS) requirements of different applica- tions. However, the performance of these protocols is highly affected by the characteristics of the wireless channel and may be even inferior to the performance of single-path approaches. Specifically, when multiple adjacent paths are being used concurrently, the broadcast nature of wireless channels results in inter-path interference which significantly degrades end-to-end throughput. In this paper, we propose a Low- Interference Energy-efficient Multipath Routing protocol (LIEMRO) to improve the QoS requirements of event-driven applications. In addition, in order to optimize resource utilization over the established paths, LIEMRO employs a quality-based load balancing algorithm to regulate the amount of traffic injected into the paths. The performance gain of LIEMRO compared to the ETX-based single-path routing protocol is 85%, 80%, and 25% in terms of data delivery ratio, end-to-end throughput, and network lifetime, respectively. Fur- thermore, the end-to-end latency is improved more than 60%.
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paper_title: LIEMRO: A Low-Interference Energy-Efficient Multipath Routing Protocol for Improving QoS in Event-Based Wireless Sensor Networks

paper_content:

In the recent years, multipath routing techniques are recognized as an effective approach to improve QoS in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). However, in most of the previously proposed protocols either the effects of inter-path interference are ignored, or establishing low-interference paths is very costly. In this paper, we propose a Low-Interference Energy-efficient Multipath ROuting protocol (LIEMRO) for WSNs. This protocol is mainly designed to improve packet delivery ratio, lifetime, and latency, through discovering multiple interference-minimized node-disjoint paths between source node and sink node. In addition, LIEMRO includes a load balancing algorithm to distribute source node’s traffic over multiple paths based on the relative quality of each path. Simulation results show that using LIEMRO in high traffic load conditions can increase data reception rate and network lifetime even more than 1.5x compared with single path routing approach, while end-to-end latency reduces significantly. Accordingly, LIEMRO is a multipath solution for event-driven applications in which lifetime, reliability, and latency are of great importance.
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Title: Multipath Routing in Wireless Sensor Networks: A Survey and Analysis

Section 1: Introduction
Description 1: This section introduces the background, motivations, and problem statement for multipath routing in wireless sensor networks.

Section 2: Multipath Routing In Wireless Sensor Networks
Description 2: This section presents the motivations for using multipath routing, covering data reliability, fault tolerance, load balancing, bandwidth aggregation, and QoS improvement.

Section 3: Basic Elements in Designing Multipath Routing Protocols
Description 3: This section outlines the essential components of multipath routing protocols, including path discovery, path selection and traffic distribution, and path maintenance.

Section 4: Taxonomy Of Multipath Routing Protocols
Description 4: This section categorizes multipath routing protocols based on path selection and traffic distribution mechanisms.

Section 5: Alternate Path Routing
Description 5: This section discusses protocols designed to maintain alternate paths to provide fault tolerance in case of primary path failures.

Section 6: Concurrent Multipath Routing
Description 6: This section explores protocols that use multiple paths simultaneously to improve reliability through concurrent data forwarding.

Section 7: Multipath Routing Protocols for Efficient Network Resource Utilization
Description 7: This section reviews protocols aimed at balancing network traffic and resource utilization to enhance network lifetime and performance.

Section 8: Conclusion
Description 8: This section summarizes the benefits of multipath routing and emphasizes the need for further research and detailed classification of the protocols.