An Energy-Aware and Fault Tolerant Inter-Cluster Communication Based Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

This paper presents a QoS-aware routing protocol for event-driven, query-based and periodic Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). This algorithm is cluster-based and aims at optimizing energy dissipation in the network as well as providing fault tolerance and connectivity to the network. It uses clusterhead nodes and the nodes closest to each other within two neighboring clusters for relaying messages. Thus, message propagation through the network is accomplished by using short transmissions. Moreover, the algorithm proposes an energy- aware approach by alternating the nodes responsible for inter- cluster communication while supporting network connectivity and avoiding congested links. We discuss the implementation of our protocol and present its proof of correctness.