Optimal reliable and energy aware inter-cluster communication in wireless sensor networks

Inter-cluster communication technique is drawing immense research interest in recent wireless sensor network (WSN) applications. Since sensor nodes are very much constrained in power supply, extending lifetime of these sensors is essential. On the other hand, it is difficult to provide reliable data transfer in WSNs because of their unreliable link quality and congestion at a cluster head (CH) node. CHs perform the crucial inter-cluster communication task for WSN. However, extreme use of energy due to relaying multi-hop data traffic leads to sudden death of a CH node. Existing routing protocols usually utilize minimum hop count or energy consumption path for inter-cluster path selection; consequently, they ignore the reliability in the routing process. In this paper, we have proposed an optimal inter-cluster routing technique considering both energy consumption and reliability. Reliability is measured in terms of link quality and congestion that mainly introduce data loss. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed technique has improved both network lifetime and reliability significantly compared with the contemporary cluster based routing techniques.