Optimization of Wireless Sensor Networks Inspired by Small World Phenomenon

Routing process includes hop by hop route discovery followed by transmission of packets on that route. Efficiency of any route discovery process depends on the length of the discovered route and the total number of messages exchanged over that route. Specifically in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) these factors have direct impact on the energy of sensor nodes and thus on the overall network lifetime. This paper adopts the theory of Small World Phenomenon to discover the short and long range paths between any given source-destination pair. OPNET based simulations are carried to evaluate the performance parameters such as number of messages, and network level energy consumption. Simulation results show 8% reduction in energy consumption and 40% reduction in message exchanges throughout the network by using the proposed mechanism.