A distributed algorithm for energy efficient and fault tolerant routing in wireless sensor networks

Energy conservation and fault tolerance are the most two important challenging issues for the development of large scale wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Failure of cluster heads in a cluster based WSN is more catastrophic as they are responsible not only for data aggregation and transmission of the aggregated data to the base station but also relaying data for multi-hop communication. Therefore, a routing algorithm in WSNs should be energy aware as well as fault tolerant. In this paper, we present a distributed energy efficient and fault tolerant routing algorithm for WSNs. The algorithm selects next-hop cluster head in energy efficient manner in the data routing phase and carefully restores the connectivity of the neighbours of a cluster head in case of its failure. The algorithm is tested extensively by considering several scenarios of WSN. The experimental results are compared with the existing algorithms in terms of several metrics to show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.