A Novel Stateless Energy-Efficient Routing Algorithm for Large-Scale Wireless Sensor Networks with Multiple Sinks

As the energy becomes the most valuable resource in the wireless sensor networks, to prolong the lifetime of the network, energy-aware protocols are proposed which use the energy minimization techniques and multi-hop paths. However, multi-hop paths and complex calculations at nodes introduce delay and processing overhead. Providing energy-efficiency becomes a scalability problem. Scalability of a routing protocol for wireless sensor networks is mainly affected by the topological changes and by the number of sensor nodes in the network. In large scale networks with a large number of sensor nodes, multiple-sinks (gateways) should be used to provide scalability. In this paper, a novel stateless energy-efficient routing technique, stateless weight routing with multiple sinks (MS-SWR), is introduced for wireless sensor networks. MS-SWR requires no local/global topological information. Property of being stateless avoids the communication overhead and reduces the calculations to minimum. In MS-SWR, reliability is provided by using multiple paths which also reduces the delay to minimum for the time-critical real-time traffic. The performance evaluation of the proposed technique shows that MS-SWR is scalable for large scale wireless sensor networks with multiple sinks.