FTGAF-HEX: fuzzy logic based two-level geographic routing protocol in wireless sensor networks

Minimization of energy consumption has become a major challenge in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) as it directly corresponds to the network lifetime. In WSNs, geographic adaptive fidelity (GAF) is one of the most energy efficient location based protocol which extends the network lifetime by identifying equivalence between sensors using geographic location information and then keeping unnecessary sensors in sleep state, while maintaining application fidelity. Still traditional GAF cannot reach to the optimum energy usage since it needs more hop count to transmit data packets to the base station called sink. As a result, it leads to higher energy usage and packet delay due to participation of more sensors. In this paper, a fuzzy logic based topology management protocol named FTGAF-HEX, which bases on GAF is proposed to achieve minimum packet delay with higher energy conservation. Furthermore, we propose to use a generalized version of GAF based on honeycomb virtual grid architecture called Hexagonal GAF (GAF-HEX) to replace the square grid with hexagonal one. Analysis and simulation results show significant improvement of the proposed work compared to traditional GAF in the aspect of various performance metrics i.e., total hop count, energy consumption and distance covered by the data packet before reaching the sink. As a result, compared to traditional GAF-HEX, it needs 37–44% less hop count and consumes 17–24% less energy to prolong the network lifetime.