Enhancing Reliability in Backbone Assisted Wireless Sensor Networks

The initial route discovery or the final node to node association is an important metric to determine the performance of any routing protocol. While not remarking on the efficiency of the existing routing protocols, we develop a method to construct an initial backbone structure that can be used for communications. Specific to application domains in a wireless sensor network, the quality of service parameters varies. Our approach is based on a backbone structure that takes care of the robustness of the followed routes by employing a hybrid algorithm ‘Quasi-MST’. Also, it guarantees the communication reliability by maintaining an alternate parent list in case of node failures due to energy depletion. We try to analyze the effect of varying ranges and sink positions on the reliability of the network when subject to node failures. We also put forward a more robust mechanism to counter for route failures.