A Novel Fault Tolerant and Energy-Efficient Load Balancing Technique in Wireless Sensor Networks with Stochastic Routing
Zaiwar Ali, Ziaul Haq Abbas and Frank Y. Li
Well timed, reliable, and energy efficient transmission of critical information is vital for many applications like military, detection of flood or fire, and disaster relief. Such applications of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) rely on unreliable communication links. Consequently the improvement of packet delivery while reducing the delivery delay to destination with minimum energy consumption in these WSNs is a major challenge. In this paper, we propose a decentralized energy efficient stochastic routing technique to improve the packet delivery ratio and load balancing effect and decrease the delivery delay to destination in WSNs. For modeling and evaluation of the expected delivery delay and delivery ratio to the destination node, the Markov chain is used. The energy of the network is also evaluated. Simulation results show that in terms of energy consumption, packets delivery, and delivery delay to destination node, our proposed routing technique achieves better performance as compared to the existing decentralized methods.
Keywords: Wireless sensor network, stochastic routing, fault tolerance, reliability, expected delivery ratio, expected delivery delay, Markov chain.