Hierarchical Energy Balanced Fault Tolerant Multipath Routing Protocol (HEBFTMRP) for Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

In this paper, the performance of hierarchical routing and fault tolerant routing scheme are combined and proposed a protocol named Hierarchical Energy Balanced Fault Tolerant Multipath Routing (HEBFTMR). Due to the hierarchical scheme adopted, cluster head energy level is saved. Cluster head in lower region can communicate to the higher region cluster head via the intermediate level cluster heads. Cluster head is changed frequently to equalize the load among the cluster members in the cluster. This cluster head is selected based on the following factors: residual energy, node weightage, distance between the neighbour nodes and the distance between the neighbour node and base station. Multipath routing is established to transmit data from the member node to the cluster head node for efficient data transmission. This is necessary due to the nature of sensors has frequent link broken. If the link is broken, neighbour node selection is important to route the data efficiently. The tolerant energy level of the sensor for route the data is determined. When the energy level decreases below the threshold value, other neighbour node is selected. Simulation results reveal that the proposed scheme proves that this combined scheme performs well when compared to the existing scheme in WSN environment.