Environment-Cognitive Multipath Routing Protocol in Wireless Sensor Networks

Existing routing protocols of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) attempted to optimize the energy efficiency and the routing reliability from the perspective of the network itself and failed to take into consideration the environmental impact from outside, causing them cannot make prompt reaction to the dynamic changes of the environments (e.g., wildfire). Thus, in these routing protocols the routing survivability under harsh environments is questionable. To tackle this issue, in this paper by referencing the concept of potential field, we design an environment-cognitive multipath routing protocol (ECMRP) in order to provide sustainable message forwarding service under harsh environments. In ECMRP, routing decisions are made according to a mixed potential field in terms of depth, residual energy and environment. The basic idea of this approach is to instruct data packets to select routes with the tradeoff among latency, energy conservation and routing survivability. As the environmental field is constructed and updated using the sensing capability of WSN itself, constructed routes can avoid crossing through the danger zones to keep the paths safe. The experimental results show that ECMRP can obtain significant improvements in packet delivery ratio and network lifetime under harsh conditions.