Energy Balanced Zone Based Routing Protocol to Mitigate Congestion in Wireless Sensor Networks

• Published in: Wireless personal communications Vol. 97; no. 2; pp. 2683 - 2711
• Main Authors: Sunitha, G. P., Dilip Kumar, S. M., Vijaya Kumar, B. P.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York Springer US 01.11.2017; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Clustering; Communications Engineering; Computer Communication Networks; Energy conservation; Energy consumption; Engineering; Networks; Performance degradation; Remote sensors; Signal,Image and Speech Processing; Wireless sensor networks; Congestion control; Zone based routing; Wireless Sensor Networks; Gradient value; Energy efficient
• ISSN: 0929-6212; 1572-834X
• DOI: 10.1007/s11277-017-4630-4

Congestion in Wireless Sensor Networks is one of the primary causes of performance degradation due to severe packet loss leading to excessive energy consumption. Normally, the nodes closer to the sink are overburdened with huge traffic load as the data from the entire region are forwarded through them to reach the sink. As a result, their energy gets exhausted quickly and the network gets fragmented. To mitigate this issue, we propose a three phase energy balanced zone based routing protocol. Specifically, in the first phase the region is physically divided into equi-sized zones. In the second phase, a node with minimum traffic and minimum distance from other nodes inside each zone is selected as the zone leader. This leader is responsible for delivering data generated by any node in that zone and for routing and forwarding the data received from other zone leaders of the neighbor zones. In the third phase, zones are categorized as non-congested, medium-congested and congested zones and route path is established in inter and intra zones. The novelty of the proposed protocol lies behind the idea of incorporating the zone congestion levels along with the hop count into the routing decisions. A congestion control mechanism is proposed both at inter and intra zone levels in order to relieve the congested areas in case of congestion occurrence. Experimental evaluation shows that the proposed protocol has the potential to achieve up to 10.5% enhancement in the network throughput, 19.5% energy saving when compared with grid-based multi-path GMCAR with congestion avoidance and 23.03% energy saving when compared with priority-based application-specific congestion control clustering protocol PASCC .