A Distributed Energy Efficient and Reliable Routing Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Energy awareness is always a key issue to design a routing protocol for wireless sensor networks (WSNs) due to the capability limitation of the nodes. Reliability has come to an important issue in WSNs, since the nodes are prone to failure and the networks are unstable. In this paper, we present a hybrid routing protocol for WSNs which integrates the clustering hierarchical structure and multi-path routing algorithm. The proposed Energy Efficient and Reliable Routing Protocol (EERRP) uses clustering hierarchical structure to efficiently decrease the amount of data transmissions between nodes and the base station (BS). Furthermore, our protocol allows cluster heads (CHs) transmit data to the BS along multiple disjoint paths, so as to improve the transmission reliability even if some paths are in failure. By these ways, EERRP is able to improve the reliability of the traffic transmission, in the same time reduce the energy consumption of the whole network. In this paper, we also creatively classified nodes into several categories, according to their different roles in WSNs. This classification considers the situation of unbalanced energy consumption, e.g. neighbors of BS having more traffic relaying burden. We also account for the problem of energy exhaustion of CH. All the above phases are completed in distributed manner. The simulation results showed our proposed protocol outperforms previous works in both energy consumption and reliability.