Environmental monitoring aware routing: making environmental sensor networks more robust

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have a broad application range in the area of monitoring and surveillance tasks. Among these tasks, disaster detection or prevention in environmental scenarios is one typical application for WSN. Disasters may for example be forest fires, volcano outbreaks or flood disasters. Here, 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 phenomena themselves. This paper presents a proactive 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 OLSR based routing in the same scenario.