Toward a Multi-Hop, Multi-Path Fault-Tolerant and Load Balancing Hierarchical Routing Protocol for Wireless Sensor Network

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.