Energy efficient routing with guaranteed delivery in wireless sensor networks

High delivery ratio with low energy consumption is one of design challenges for wireless sensor network routing protocols. In this paper, we identify the drawbacks of pure single path routing scheme and multipath routing scheme, in terms of guaranteed delivery with low energy consumption. Accordingly, we describe a scheme, in which data is forwarded along a pre-established single path to save energy, and a high delivery ratio is achieved by path repair whenever a break is detected. We propose a simple, quick, local path repairing approach, whereby a pivot node can skip over path break by only using the already existing routing information in its neighborhood. We implement this scheme and compare its performance with those of pure single path without repair and two multipath routing schemes. Simulation results show that in the same network topology with the same failed nodes, our single-path with repair routing scheme (SWR) has the highest delivery ratio among all the compared schemes in almost all the test cases. The energy consumed by SWR for one data delivery test is relatively low compared with the other schemes.