WEAR: a balanced, fault-tolerant, energy-aware routing protocol in WSNs

As more and more real Wireless Sensor Network's (WSN)applications have been tested and deployed over the last five years, the research community of WSN realises that several issues need to be revisited from practical angles, such as reliability and security. In this paper, we address the reliability issue by designing a general energy-efficient, load balanced, fault-tolerant and scalable routing protocol. We first abstract four fundamental requirements of any practical routing protocol based on the intrinsic nature of WSN and argue that none of previous proposed routing protocols satisfies all of them at the same time. A novel general routing protocol called WEAR is then proposed to fill the gap by taking into consideration four factors that affect the routing policy, namely the distance to the destination, the energy level of the sensor, the global location information and the local hole information. Furthermore, to handle holes, which are a large space without active sensors caused by fault sensors, we propose a scalable, hole size-oblivious hole identification and maintenance protocol. Finally, our comprehensive simulation shows that WEAR performs much better in comparing with GEAR and GPSR in terms of eight proposed performance metrics; especially, it extends the Lifetime of the Sensor Network (LSN) about 15% longer than that of GPSR.