Traffic aware field-based routing for wireless sensor networks

Route estimation process often involves significant message exchanges among wireless sensor nodes while selecting the least cost path. Nodes along this path handle more traffic that leads to death of battery powered nodes and shortening network life. Thus, routing mechanisms for wireless sensor network (WSN) must be traffic aware and at the same time, the alternate route(s) incur less delay overhead. This paper considers a query-driven application scenario in WSN where the sink diffuses query over the network to fetch information. A novel field-based routing (FBR) mechanism is proposed that inherits the physical properties of Coulomb’s law for point charges in free space. It defines a distance field parameter corresponding to each sensor node with respect to the sink. The sink being the negatively charged particle the packets from sensor nodes (positively charged particle) flow towards the field generating sink. The algorithm considers energy depletion rate for estimating the virtual potential field at nodes so as to avoid the nodes having less remaining energy. Further, the gradient updation is based on the local information which results in less message complexity (O(n)) and low computation overhead, which is comparable to the best available approaches. NS-2 based simulation demonstrates a significant enhancement in network lifetime, increased packet reception ratio and reduction in energy dissipation rate making the FBR mechanism suitable for WSN.