On the Exploration of Adaptive Mechanisms Providing Reliability in Clustered WSNs for Power Plant Monitoring

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are used in almost every sensing and detection environment instead of wired devices in the current world, all the more in power plant monitoring applications. In such a kind of environment, providing reliability is a challenging task, since WSN makes use of low powered sensors. There are many existing works that provide reliable transmission in WSN (predominantly via multipath routing). However, most of the existing works take additional delay, excessive packet loss, and energy consumption, and hence they provide less packet delivery and throughput. Adaptive Priority Routing (APR) is first proposed during the initial design to provide efficiency in next hop selection. APR computes the priority value for selecting the intermediate nodes during the data transmission in order to improve the packet delivery, throughput, and energy efficiency. In addition to this, APR is developed into QAPR protocol to provide reliability which can operate in two modes, 𝐷 representing distance mode and 𝑄 representing quality of service (QoS) mode. The proposed work is simulated in both flat topology and hierarchical topologies and the simulation analysis shows that the reliability is increased significantly in comparison with existing works.