A Hybrid Routing Protocol for Robust Wireless Sensor Networks

Deploying a large number of tiny sensor nodes in unattended locations leads to a wide variety of WSN applications in military, environment, health, and disaster management areas. As sensor nodes consist of limited energy resources and recharging them is not possible, it is necessary to design the energy-efficient routing protocols. Most of the literature on routing protocols for WSNs can be broadly classified into centralized and distributed protocols. In centralized protocols such as low-energy adaptive clustering hierarchy (LEACH), nodes transmit the data directly to cluster heads. Cluster heads gather the information from all the sensor nodes in the cluster and forwards to the base station. Node failures is a common phenomenon in WSNs. Failure of cluster heads leads to loss of information in that cluster. Hence, centralized protocols are less robust to topology changes due to node failures. To overcome this problem, we can implement distributed algorithms such as average consensus algorithms, where nodes exchange information with only the direct neighbors and calculate the weighted average at every time instant. This process will continue until every node obtains the average of the initial parameter values. Although, this protocol is highly robust to topology changes, it consumes a lot of energy compared to the LEACH protocol. In this work, we compare the energy consumed in the LEACH protocol and the consensus routing protocol and propose an alternative algorithm which is more robust than LEACH and highly energy-efficient than consensus protocol.