Reliable and energy-efficient routing protocol in dense wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Reliable delivery of sensory data to a sink node in large scale sensor networks is a challenging problem. We tackle this problem by assuming dense deployment of sensors, which allows us to exploit diversity in choosing intermediate nodes for reliability and energy-efficiency. The proposed reliable and Energy-Efficient Routing (REER) protocol is based on the geographic routing approach. The central idea of REER is the notion of Reference Nodes (RNs), which means the nodes closest to the ideal locations between the source and to the sink. The multiple Cooperative Nodes (CNs) around RNs will contend to relay data packets; thus, there is no overhead of route discovery and REER is resilient to node failures and transmission errors. By adjusting the distances between RNs, we can control the trade-off between reliability and energy-efficiency, which is validated by both analysis and simulation.