E3AF: Energy Efficient Environment-Aware Fusion Based Reliable Routing in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) is the base for many critical applications where a large number of nodes are deployed in the monitored field. Those nodes suffer from limited processing capabilities as well as energy. They are also required to live for a long time; sensors send their data to the sink node through multi-hop routing. The sink node is responsible for making the appropriate decision based on the received data. This shows how critical the information fusion process at the sink node. Such fusion is affected by the quality of the collected information from the deployed sensors. In addition, information handling in the WSN is also affected by environmental conditions, sensors energy, and data reliability, which play important roles in the eminence of information fusion. This paper introduces an efficient environment-aware fusion-based reliable routing algorithm named E3AF. The algorithm takes different parameters into consideration, including environmental metrics, energy consumption balance among sensor nodes, and network and data reliability. The algorithm models the environment to allow the routing algorithm to avoid going through areas marked dangerous. The paper formulates the problem into an optimization problem, which is structured as an Integer Linear programming (ILP) to help grasp and obtain the optimum solution. Furthermore, the paper presents swarm intelligence as a heuristic algorithm when the optimal solution is not possible. In comparison to EFMRP, some of the used equations were corrected, and more realistic conditions and constraints were added. With extensive experiments, the proposed algorithm is evaluated and proved its efficiency.