Traffic-aware routing protocol for wireless sensor networks

In wireless sensor networks, when a sensor node detects events in the surrounding environment, the sensing period for learning detailed information is likely to be short. However, the short sensing cycle increases the data traffic of the sensor nodes in a routing path. Since the high traffic load causes a data queue overflow in the sensor nodes, important information about urgent events could be lost. In addition, since the battery energy of the sensor nodes is quickly exhausted, the entire lifetime of wireless sensor networks would be shortened. In this paper, to address these problem issues, a new routing protocol is proposed based on a lightweight genetic algorithm. In the proposed method, the sensor nodes are aware of the data traffic rate to monitor the network congestion. In addition, the fitness function is designed from both the average and the standard deviation of the traffic rates of sensor nodes. Based on dominant gene sets in a genetic algorithm, the proposed method selects suitable data forwarding sensor nodes to avoid heavy traffic congestion. In experiments, the proposed method demonstrates efficient data transmission due to much less queue overflow and supports fair data transmission for all sensor nodes. From the results, it is evident that the proposed method not only enhances the reliability of data transmission but also distributes the energy consumption across wireless sensor networks.