Multi-criteria Routing in a Partitioned Wireless Sensor Network

Energy efficiency is one of the key challenges for designing routing algorithms for wireless sensor networks (WSN). Fast data delivery from source node to sink node is also required for many applications. Sometimes data transmission towards the sink may be interrupted because of failure of nodes in a particular area. The various such requirements of routing data in a WSN are sometimes contradictory and routing algorithms must be designed keeping in mind all these requirements. In this paper three routing algorithms are proposed for multi-sink partitioned network. In these three algorithms, the source nodes or intermediate nodes select a next node to forward the data to the destination or sink. This process repeats until the data reaches the sink. In the first technique, the next node is chosen considering its distance from sink node as a criterion. In the second technique, remaining energy of the neighboring nodes is used as a criterion for selection of the next node. The combination of these two criteria is considered in the third technique and a multiple criteria decision analysis technique is used. A recovery technique from area failure is also proposed and incorporated in the above mentioned algorithms. The algorithms are designed and implemented in multi-sink environment for partitioned wireless sensor networks. Performances of the algorithms are studied in a simulation environment and compared with other well-known algorithms to understand their effectiveness.