Environment-fusion multipath routing protocol for wireless sensor networks

Abstract In most cases, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are deployed in unattended scenarios and are featured by energy sensitivity and low cost, thus making the performance of WSNs prone to the impact of external environment and internal energy. Existing routing protocols attempted to optimize the energy efficiency and routing reliability from the perspective of the network itself and failed to take into consideration the environmental impact from outside, causing them cannot make prompt reactions to the dynamic changes of the environments (e.g., wildfire). Thus, in these routing protocols the routing survivability under harsh environments is questionable. To tackle this issue, the paper proposes an environment-fusion multipath routing protocol (EFMRP) to provide sustainable message forwarding service under harsh environments. In EFMRP, routing decisions are made according to a mixed potential field in terms of depth, residual energy and environment. The basic idea of this approach is to instruct data packets to select routes with the best trade-off among latency, energy conservation and routing survivability. As the environmental field is constructed and updated using the sensing capability of WSN itself, constructed routes can avoid crossing through the danger zones to keep the paths safe. To enhance the performance of EFMRP, specific maintenance, traffic allocation and retreat mechanisms are proposed. We investigate the impact of configuration parameters and paths number on the routing performance respectively and compare EFMRP with respect to commonly used routing protocols. The experimental results show that EFMRP can obtain significant improvements in packet delivery ratio and network lifetime under harsh environments.