Energy efficient and fault tolerant routing protocol for mobile wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Due to the frequently changing network topology, it is a great challenging work to design energy efficient and fault tolerant routing protocols for Mobile Wireless Sensor Networks (MWSN) applications such as wildlife monitoring, battlefield surveillance and health monitoring. In MWSN, however, most existing routing protocols either do not support node mobility well or do not have fault tolerance. This paper proposes an Energy efficient and Fault Tolerant Clustering Protocol (EFTCP) for MWSN. The proposed EFTCP has high fault tolerance through providing an alternate for each cluster head node. And EFTCP can also reach efficient message transmission by the method that cluster heads adaptively allocate timeslots to their member nodes according to the amount of data needed to send. Simulation results show that EFTCP-MWSN has much longer lifetime than LEACH-Mobile, and more efficient than FTCP-MWSN as to message transmission.