Delay-Sensitive, Reliable, Energy-Efficient, Adaptive and Mobility-Aware (DREAM) Routing Protocol for WSNs

A majority of Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) research at present is focussed on the problems of limited energy supply and its impact on network lifetime. Nevertheless, the plethora of applications conceivable with the help of WSNs often demand for MOO (Multi-Objective Optimization) formulations, where several design goals contend together for the best trade-off solution among them. Therefore, research investigators must also regard other miscellaneous issues in addition to energy efficiency for applicability of WSNs in practical scenarios like Internet of Things. DREAM (Delay-sensitive, Reliable, Energy-Efficient, Adaptive and Mobility-Aware) routing protocol is proposed in the present work, that ameliorates network lifetime (in terms of First Node Death and Last Node Death), throughput (in terms of number of packets sent to Base Station) and latency (average end-to-end delay in seconds) in the network along with enhancing the reliability (in terms of percentage packet loss) of delivered data. The proposed protocol also integrates mobility and heterogeneity of the nodes to cater to the needs of an application-independent general purpose WSN routing protocol, which can be used commercially. Comparative analysis with existing protocols establishes the superiority of the proposed protocol, which is capable of improving the network lifetime by about 3.54% and simultaneously lowering the delay by 35.5%, along with the amelioration of other parameters.