An improved immune system-inspired routing recovery scheme for energy harvesting wireless sensor networks

To address problems of fault-tolerant routing recovery and routings’ quality maintenance in energy harvesting wireless sensor networks (EH-WSNs), we proposed an improved immune system-inspired routing recovery algorithm (ISRRA) to provide an intelligent scheme for EH-WSNs. The ISRRA could maintain k best disjoint path from each source node to the sink. It investigates the optimal alternative strategies for the faulty routing and recovers the problems with four units (the surveillance unit, the response unit, the learn unit and the memory unit) as imitating the immune system, especially for the same fault routing happened again. Moreover, during the routing recovery process, ISRRA also check other candidate routings to decide whether to update the backup routings, which is used to maintain routings’ quality and also greatly improve the fault-tolerant ability of EH-WSNs. In order to overcome the limited diversity of antibody population and prematurity of clone selection algorithm used in the learn unit, an improved clone and mutation scheme inspired by the regulation laws of hormone in endocrine system is proposed in ISRRA. Finally, to verify the effectiveness of the proposed ISRRA, a series of simulation experiments are conducted and compared with two other routing recovery schemes. The simulation results have verified that the ISRRA-based protocol can provide reliable communication with effective routing recovery scheme and highlight the better performance of the proposed approach than that of similar techniques.