WEAR: A Balanced, Fault-Tolerant, Energy-Aware Routing Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

As more and more real wireless sensor networks (WSN) applications have been tested and deployed recently, the research community realizes that several issues need to be revisited from practical angles. In this paper, we focus on designing a general energy-efficient, load balanced, fault-tolerant, and scalable routing protocol. First, we abstract four fundamental requirements of any practical routing protocol, based on the intrinsic nature of WSN. We argue that none of previous proposed routing protocols satisfies all of them at the same time. The novelty of our protocol is building a general routing protocol called WEAR which takes into consideration four factors that affect the routing policy, namely the distance to the destination, the energy level of the sensor, the global location information, and the local hole information. All these factors are mixed and integrated into the notion of weight in the WEAR protocol. Furthermore, to handle holes, a large space without sensors, efficiently, which is a common behavior in any real sensor network deployment, we propose a scalable, hole size oblivious hole identification and maintenance protocol. Finally, to evaluate the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed protocol, we define seven general performance metrics for evaluating routing protocols in WSN. In terms of these metrics, our comprehensive simulation results show that, compared with GPSR, WEAR extends the lifetime of the sensor network about 15% longer, increases the reply successful delivery rate more than 7%. Compared with GEAR, WEAR also performs better in terms of almost all the performance metrics.