Proposition and evaluation of a novel routing protocol for wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks are very constrained by a low bandwidth and high latency due to the shared nature of the radio medium. Nevertheless, the real critical issue in these networks is energy. Several routing protocols have been proposed in the literature to maximize the lifetime of wireless sensor networks, however, most of these solutions use a routing through a single path, which can rapidly deplete the energy of some nodes (those are part of the optimal path) more than the other nodes. This usually leads to partitioning in the network and of course to the death of this later. The aim of this paper is to propose a new protocol for multi-path routing in which nodes choose one route among several routes with a probability which will count the residual energy, the energy of the communication and the number of paths including the forwarding node. Our approach allows the sensor nodes of the network wasting their energy in an equitable manner. Thus, our protocol enhances the lifetime of the sensor network. This is proved by simulation on SENSIM. We have implemented our solution and compared it with EAR, results show that our protocol outperforms EAR by enhancing the network lifetime.