New SAPFR protocol for WSNs with sensitive clusters

In WSNs, accidents like traffic congestion and sensor node running out of energy may occur frequently. These accidents are usually geographically localized, resulting in some groups of nodes unusable temporarily or even forever, which are called sensitive clusters in this paper. Although the data collection methods have been intensively studied, how to dynamically optimize the routing to bypass the sensitive clusters is an interesting and open issue. A new distributed, location-based routing protocol, named sensitive artificial potential field routing (SAPFR), is proposed to deliver packets efficiently while bypassing the sensitive clusters adaptively. SAPFR can build the multihop route from a sensor node to the sink with high energy efficiency and power consumption balancing. In particular, SAPFR is highly adaptive to bypass the dynamic sensitive clusters. Simulation results show that the obtained routes proactively bypass the sensitive clusters and the transmission efficiency is improved as well. SAPFR provides a high routing success rate in the WSNs even with a large proportion of sensitive sensor nodes.