Research of Balanced-Alternative Spanning Tree for Wireless Sensor Networks

In wireless sensor networks (WSNs), lifetime and failure-tolerance seem to be a part of contradiction. The traditional spanning tree mostly focuses on network lifetime, and use data-aggregation to save network energy. In order to keep the whole network available during nodes failure, a routing protocol that is called balanced-alternative spanning tree (BAST) is proposed. This routing protocol has two different strategies in the normal case and nodes failure case. Since the routing protocol use directed construction and reconstruction methods, it can harmonize the energy efficiency and failure-tolerance on a desired balance. In this paper, the construction and working principles of balanced-alternative communication tree are discussed. For overcoming the frangibility of traditional spanning tree, reconstruction scenario of tree-based communication path is emphatically explored. Furthermore, the proposed protocol is evaluated from the effect of energy efficiency to the failure-tolerance. With the simulation, the performance of BAST is verified to be efficient and available.