Score based reliable routing in wireless sensor networks

The main purpose of a sensor network is information gathering and delivery. Therefore, the quantity and quality of the data delivered to the end-user is very important. In this paper, we focus on designing a general energy efficient, fault tolerant, and highly reliable routing protocol that prolongs the network lifetime; we call it SBRR (Score Based Reliable Routing). As the main objectives of this protocol are the reduction of packet loss and packet error, we select the best quality path of the network for highly reliable data transfer. The routing decision is based on a heuristic parameter named dasiaPath Scorepsila, which is a combination of four factors. These factors are relevant to hop count, energy level of sensors, error rate of links, and free buffer size of sensors for each path. Also our algorithm utilizes a disjoint backup path for every source; as a result, this reduces the risk of data loss and delivery delay. Simulation results reveal that the proposed algorithm yields a longer network lifetime, less packet latency, and higher delivery ratio than other existing schemes.