Resource Aware and Reliable Routing in Heterogeneous WSNs

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) can be used in many applications. Since the energy resources are limited in the sensor nodes, full utilization of resources with minimum energy remains the main consideration when a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) application is designed. For some specific applications, data reliability needs to be considered beside the energy consumption to guarantee the quality of network where the sensed data should reach the sink node in a more reliable way. Moreover, due to the limited on-sensor memory, buffer overflow may cause more packet loss and more energy consumption due to retransmission of the same packet. Hence, efficient use of available buffer is highly desirable in WSN. This paper proposes a routing scheme that uses SWARM intelligence to achieve minimum energy consumption and balanced energy among sensor nodes for WSN lifetime extension. In addition, data reliability is considered beside the minimization of buffer overflow. The interesting point of using swarm intelligent technique in this work is that sensor nodes use only their local information which reduces the overhead for routing. Through simulation, the performance of our approach is compared with the previous work for heterogeneous networks with non-uniform and uniform events generation patterns.