A Trade-Off Between Reliability and Energy Efficiency for Inter-cluster Communication in Wireless Sensor Networks

Cluster heads (CHs) form the backbone of the crucial inter-cluster communication for wireless sensor network (WSN). Due to relaying high data traffic, some of these nodes quickly exhaust their precious energy and increase the risk of node failure. In conjunction with the node failure, data packet loss also occurs in a CH due to congestion and poor link quality. Traditional routing algorithms choose either minimum hop count or merely energy efficient paths to forward data towards the base station (BS), consequently, they don´t directly consider the reliability (data loss) in the selection process of a routing path for a WSN. In this paper, we propose a cost function for routing path selection mechanism for inter-cluster communication by exploiting a trade-off between energy and reliability. We use link quality and congestion at CH node as path metrics related to reliability. Our protocol analyzes all possible inter-cluster communication paths between a source CH and the BS and selects minimum energy path, maximum reliability path and a trade-off between these two. Performance analysis of the proposed scheme is justified by simulation, which demonstrate that our technique achieves substantial energy savings and improved reliability over the contemporary cluster based routing techniques.