Highly Reliable and Load-balancing Routing Protocol for the Wireless Sensor Network

Abstract

In wireless sensor networks, the reliability of message delivery is low because its wireless medium has a high packet loss rate and some nodes frequently may not work because each node uses a small amount of battery power. In addition, if single path routing protocol is used, the load is placed on some particular node, causing congestion. As a result, this degrades the overall network performance, as well as increases delays. In contrast, if the routing protocol provides multiple paths, not only does it guarantee fault tolerance, but also improves reliability by broadcasting messages using multi paths. In addition, by distributing the load that is being focused on a particular node, it reduces incidence of congestion and increases the network's life time and reliability. Therefore, multi- path routing is one of several techniques being studied to solve the issue in the wireless sensor network. However, the multi-path routing protocols that have been proposed so far either have too much message overhead for finding the multi-path or use a less efficient multi path to reduce this overhead. In addition, as the number of nodes in the network grows, the routing table size is enlarged; making it unsuitable for sensor nodes with a small amount of memory. This thesis proposes a highly reliable and load-balancing routing protocol for the wire- less sensor network through finding multiple node-disjoint paths and through removing the intermediate node's routing table overhead by computing the entire path from the sink to the destination.