BIPAR: BImodal Power-Aware Routing Protocol For Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) have the potential to change the way we perform many tasks today. Examples include military applications, agriculture applications and medical applications. Routing protocols in WSN have to operate in challenged environments. In these environments, packet losses and node failures are common. One other challenge is the limited power supply of sensors since they are batterypowered, which makes power saving a crucial feature of any WSN protocol in order to increase the lifetime of the whole network. In this paper, we present ,BIPAR, a new routing protocol that counteracts the effects of the environment on sensors and, at the same time, tries to minimize its power consumption. The design of BIPAR is very intuitive. It is a semi-reliable protocol that tries to use the least amount of power to deliver data packets, i.e., it routes packets on the least-power path to the sink. If successful, this behavior saves as much battery power as possible. On the other hand, if the first transmission on the least-power path is not successful, BIPAR switches to the max-power path to the sink. This behavior consumes more energy than the first transmission, but maximizes the probability of successful communication. We simulated BIPAR in ns2[4] and evaluated it under different modes of node failure models. We compared it against GRAB[1], min-power routing scheme, and max-power routing scheme. Our simulations show that BIPAR delivers at least 30% more reports than GRAB, when node failures are spread all over the routing field. BIPAR delivers as much as 50% more reports than min-power routing protocol under the same conditions.