Energy-Efficient Relay Node Selection Scheme for Fault-Tolerant Data Routing in Wireless Sensor Networks

In recent years, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have risen in popularity because of their numerous uses in real fields, including environmental monitoring, healthcare, agriculture, industrial automation, and surveillance. In WSNs, sensor nodes gather data from the monitoring environment and transmit it to the central unit or Base Station (BS). One of the major challenges faced by WSNs is sensor node failure, which disrupts the network operation and degrades the network’s lifetime. Sensor nodes can fail for various reasons, such as battery depletion, faults in the communication module, and faulty processor module. Some environmental factors can also cause node failure. This paper proposes an energy-efficient relay and backup node selection scheme for fault-tolerant data routing in WSNs. The proposed appraoch creates clusters in the network and selects Cluster Heads (CHs) and backup CHs (BKCHs) using a K-means algorithm. Furthermore, the proposed approach applies Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) to select relay nodes and backup relay nodes for sensor nodes that enhance the network’s reliability. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is evaluated through simulations and compared with other existing approaches. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed approach performs better than the existing approaches.