Environmental Monitoring Aware Routing in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are designed for many monitoring and surveillance tasks. A typical scenario category is the use of WSNs for disaster detection in environmental scenarios. In disasters such as forest fires, volcano outbreaks or flood disasters, the monitored events have the potential to destroy the sensor devices themselves. This has implications for the network lifetime, performance and robustness. While a fairly large body of work addressing routing in WSNs exists, little attention has been paid to the aspect of node failures caused by the sensed phenomenon itself. This contribution presents a routing method that is aware of the node’s destruction threat and adapts the routes accordingly, before node failure results in broken routes, delay and power consuming route re-discovery. The performance of the presented routing scheme is evaluated and compared to AODV based routing in the same scenario.