A Novel Energy Efficient Routing Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Wireless sensor network (WSN) is a distributed, multi hop, self-organized network consisting of large number of autonomous, tiny sensor nodes deployed in a phenomena to observe or sense and communicate the sensed data to the sink node. Routing the sensed data from the source to sink node in a resource constrained environment in wireless sensor networks is still a challenge. There are many attempts made to route the data in the resource constrained scenarios. Optimal path between the source and destination is selected by the routing protocols to satisfy the resource constraints such as energy, bandwidth and computation power. The routing protocols take into account the metrics like minimum hop, minimum transmission cost, high residual energy, etc. to route the data. Many routing protocols attempt to reduce the energy usage in the nodes to increase the network lifetime. Selecting an optimal path between the source and destination and sending the data through that path may not increase the lifetime of the network. The multi-path routing protocols select the available paths between the source and destination. The data is distributed among the multiple paths and the usage of energy for the data transmission is spread among the number of nodes over multiple paths. In the recent past, many researchers presented node disjoint multipath routing protocols. Several node disjoint multipath routing protocols available today are on demand. Many wireless sensor network applications have immobile sensor node and static topology. In static topology networks reactive protocols suffer excessive routing overhead compared to proactive routing protocols. In this research work, a novel sink initiated, proactive, Energy Efficient Node Disjoint Multipath Routing Protocol (EENDMRP) for wireless sensor networks based on the rate of energy consumption and traffic through the node is proposed. It also provides digital signature based security in the data routing. It uses MD5 hash function to generate digital signatures. RSA and ECDSA are employed in the proposed EENDMRP. The performance of ithe EENDMRP is compared with Ad hoc on demand multipath routing protocol. The performance of EENDMRP is analysed through the routing metrics such as packet delivery fraction, normalized routing load, average end-to-end delay, average node energy spent and network lifetime. The proposed EENDMRP minimises the number of control messages used in the route construction, reduces the normalised routing load, increases the packet delivery fraction, reduces the end-to-end delay and increases the network lifetime. The EENDMRP also reduces the residual energy variance after the data transfer and defends the data tampering or altered routing, selective forwarding and byzantine attacks.