A Multi-Path Energy Hole Avoidance Routing Algorithm for WSN Based on GA

The multi-path routing strategy can delicately balance the energy consumption of wireless sensor networks to avoid the energy hole problem and prolong the lifetime of networks. In order to delicately plan a number of next-hop routing paths of each node, this paper proposes a multi-path energy hole avoidance routing algorithm that exploits the genetic algorithm (GA) to select numbers of next-hop nodes and distribute appropriate proportions of data to be transmitted. To obtain the global optimal solution, the algorithm redefines the code, operations and rules of searching optimal solution for the genetic algorithm. The algorithm can not only be applicable to flat networks, but also it would be applicable to hierarchical networks if improved in some sort. A significant advantage of the algorithm is that it can provide global optimal routing approach for energy balance without assuming the topology structure of network. Compared with the single-path routing algorithms, the multi-path routing algorithm in this paper increases 3.2% in the performance of optimization. Finally, this paper confirms the accuracy of the algorithm through theoretical analysis and proves the effectiveness by a number of simulated experiments.