A congestion aware routing for lifetime improving in grid-based sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) consist of a large number of tiny, low cost, memory/computational constraint, battery-operated sensor nodes deployed randomly in two (or three) dimensional plane. Due to limited amount of energy in sensors, the network seeks to attain energy efficient routing for prolonging their lifetime. Existing grid based routing protocols reduce the energy dissipation at nodes, however they suffer from congestion. Network congestion may lead to excessive energy consumption, which in turn minimizes the lifetime of network. In this paper, we propose a new Congestion Aware Lifetime Improving Routing Protocol (abbreviated shortly as CALIRP) for grid-based WSNs, which improves the network lifetime by minimizing congestion at nodes. In CALIRP, routing is conducted in a grid by grid manner through the cell-headers. To save the energy and avoid congestion, multiple routing paths are established from the source to the base station. The paths are selected based on Transmitting Factor (TF) of cell-headers which take queue occupancy, queue length and residual energy into account. In addition, CALIRP adjusts node's transmitting factor for reconstructing the paths so that the lifetime of network is prolonged. Simulation results highlight that the proposed CALIRP outperforms other existing routing algorithms in terms of success rate, queue occupancy and number of alive nodes etc. © 2017-IOS.