Investigations on energy efficient routing protocols for reliable communication in wireless sensor networks

Abstract

A wireless sensor network (WSN)is a collection of nodes connected together in which each node consists of processing capability, memory, communication resources, sensors and actuators and power source. newlineThe functionalities of wireless sensor network include sensing activities, exchanging sensed information, aggregating data, reasoning in a local or distributed manner, raising alarms, activating other sensors, etc. Sensing, processing and communication are three key elements whose combination in one tiny device gives rise to a vast number of remote sensing applications which includes environmental monitoring, precision agriculture, medical applications and battlefield surveillance etc. Due to the miniature size of the nodes, they are typically deployed in large numbers and communicate via multiple hops through a wireless shared communication channel. The successful implementation of such networks depends on the enabling technologies, as well as providing Quality of Service (QoS) in the network. Hence it serves a large number of applications that are very critical even to the level of saving human life. As WSN deals with real world environment, sensor data must be delivered within time constraints and appropriate action has to be taken to deliver the data in time. So far only few research results exist to date regarding achieving real-time requirements in WSN. Most protocols either ignore real-time or simply attempt to process as fast as possible and hope that this speed is sufficient to meet deadlines. Therefore, the main objective of the research is to first review the techniques for QoS support in WSNs giving the first priority to real time routing and finally, to propose a novel routing protocol to achieve high level of performance by enhancing QoS in real time Wireless Sensor Networks. newline