TITLE:
Toward a Multi-Hop, Multi-Path Fault-Tolerant and Load Balancing Hierarchical Routing Protocol for Wireless Sensor Network
AUTHORS:
Mokhtar Beldjehem
KEYWORDS:
Wireless Sensor Network; Protocol Design; Hierarchical Soft Clustering; Self-Organization; Fault-Tolerance; Fault-Resilience; Energy-Efficiency; Load Balancing; Scalability; Ambient Intelligence
JOURNAL NAME:
Wireless Sensor Network,
Vol.5 No.11,
November
5,
2013
ABSTRACT:
This paper describes a novel energy-aware multi-hop cluster-based
fault-tolerant load balancing hierarchical routing protocol for a
self-organizing wireless sensor network (WSN), which takes into account the
broadcast nature of radio. The main idea is using hierarchical fuzzy soft
clusters enabling non-exclusive overlapping clusters, thus allowing
partial multiple membership of a node to more than one cluster, whereby for
each cluster the clusterhead (CH) takes in charge intra-cluster issues of
aggregating the information from nodes members, and then collaborate and
coordinate with its related overlapping area heads (OAHs), which are elected
heuristically to ensure inter-clusters communication. This communication is
implemented using an extended version of time-division multiple access (TDMA)
allowing the allocation of several slots for a given node, and alternating the
role of the clusterhead and its associated overlapping area heads. Each cluster
head relays information to overlapping area heads which in turn each relays it to
other associated cluster heads in related clusters, thus the information
propagates gradually until it reaches the sink in a multi-hop fashion.