Reliable Energy Aware Routing in wireless sensor networks

The main purpose of a sensor network is information gathering and delivery. Therefore, the quantity and quality of the data delivered to the end-user is very important. The immense potential of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) has created a growing awareness of the need for reliability in such networks. A major concern in the design of WSN protocols, including those concerned with reliability, is energy efficiency. In this paper, we present a novel approach to reliability in WSNs. We introduce REAR (Reliable Energy Aware Routing), which is a distributed, on-demand, reactive routing protocol that is intended to provide a reliable transmission environment for data packet delivery. REAR introduces local node selection, path reservation and path request broadcasting delay to provide a reliable transmission environment to reduce retransmissions caused by unstable paths. The scheme efficiently utilizes the limited energy and available memory resources of sensor nodes. REAR attempts to take precaution against errors, instead of finding a solution after encountering the errors. Simulation experiments show that, by deploying an energy reservation scheme, REAR outperforms traditional schemes by establishing an energy-sufficient path from the sink to the source with special path request flooding, and also by distributing the traffic load more evenly in the network.