A Novel Levelled and Sectored Based Hybrid Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

A central challenge in sensor networks is the design of routing protocols that can adapt their behaviour to frequent and rapid changes in the network. The performance of proactive and reactive routing protocols varies with network characteristics, and one protocol may outperform the other in different network conditions. In this paper, we propose a hybrid protocol for disaster relief using wireless sensor networks. We first perform the levelling and sectoring of the network, where each node is assigned a Level ID and Sector ID with respect to the destination node. Initially, reactive routing is performed where the Base station broadcasts a data centric query in the network. If the readings provided by a certain node signal an approaching disaster, then we survey the data of nodes in that region by proactive routing. The particular region is localised by the level ID and sector ID assigned to the nodes. If more than 60% of the nodes indicate a similar situation then an alarm is raised. Simulation results also prove that the hybrid protocol gives better performance than existing protocols.