A fault-tolerant, energy-efficient routing protocol for wireless sensor networks

Multi-hop Wireless Sensors Networks (WSNs) consisting of several nodes and links are vulnerable to frequent node/ link failures. Energy saving at a node is another major consideration in WSN. Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) is a popular protocol commonly applied to WSNs; however, there is no provision of fault-tolerance and energy efficiency. In this paper, a new fault-tolerant routing and energy-efficient protocol, that modifies the conventional DSR protocol, is proposed. The protocol tries to find two routing paths (if they exist) from the source to the destination node, considering the present energy levels at intermediate nodes in the path. Simulation results show that the proposed protocol also achieves better packet delivery ratio and network throughput as compared to conventional DSR.