A Fault-Tolerant and Energy Efficient Routing in a Dense and Large Scale Wireless Sensor Network

Abstract

In a wireless sensor network, a large number of small-size cheap sensor nodes are scattered, and have limited resources such as battery power, data processing capability and memory capacity. They should show fault-tolerance, energy efficiency, and topological adaptation to the change of external environment, therefore, an effective routing algorithm is essential. In general, if a network is large in scale, multi-hop transmission is more energy efficient than direct transmission. In case a large number of nodes are deployed densely within a fixed 1-hop communication range, however, many nodes participate in data transmission, multi-hop transmission consumes much more energy in such a case. Thus, this study proposes a routing algorithm that solves above problems at the same time in a dense and large scale sensor network. The result of experiment showed that routing algorithm proposed in this study has reasonable fault-tolerance, energy efficiency, and offers its adaptability to topological changes in a dense and large scale sensor network.