A Hotline-Based Reliable Topology for Wireless Sensor Networks

Many anticipated deployment scenarios, in particular military, healthcare, and disaster-recovery applications, of wireless sensor networks require reliable source to sink communication. In this paper, we introduce a novel reliable topology that uses hotlines between sensor gateways to enhance the reliability of end-to-end transmissions. These hotlines reduce the number of average hops from source to the sink and serve as reliable and efficient backbone routing alternatives. We show analytically that communication using hotlines is noticeably more reliable than traditional wireless sensor networks routing.