Multiobjective Routing for Simultaneously Optimizing System Lifetime and Source-to-Sink Delay in Wireless Sensor Networks

We target an interesting problem of simultaneous optimization of lifetime and source-to-sink delay in wireless sensor networks, and present a fuzzy multiobjective online routing algorithm. For a routing request, the proposed routing algorithm finds a path that offers a good balance between the two routing objectives, namely maximizing the network lifetime and minimizing the source-to-sink delay. Fuzzy membership functions and rules are used for designing the cost function for each of the optimization objective and the multiobjective cost aggregation function, respectively. It is shown that the use of fuzzy logic offers a flexible mean of controlling the tradeoff between the two objectives. A set of simulation results were obtained, using numerous topologies and under various parameters, to indicate that the proposed multiobjective routing scheme is able to achieve good lifetime values while maintaining reasonably short end-to-end delay values.