Extended lifetime and reliable data transmission in wireless sensor networks with multiple sinks

Abstract

In a wireless sensor network (WSN), one of the most important constraints on sensor nodes is the low power consumption requirement. Due to this, the WSN comes with a trade-off to extend the network lifetime at the cost of lower throughput or higher transmission delay. Due to small memory, the size of the buffer limits the number of data packets can hold which implies increased overflow of data packets. This congestion and collision raise questions about the reliability of the network to forward data packets. Thus, for successful monitoring of the region of interest, the data collected by the sensor nodes need to be delivered to the sink, minimizing data loss. We tried to handle the reliability problem by inducing trust model in Cluster Algorithm for Sink Selection (CASS) approach to get an assurance of reliability with low maintenance cost to enhance the network lifetime. Experimental simulations show that with our trust model incorporated in the CASS algorithm can minimize the packet drop rate in the presence of a different number of unreliable nodes while trying to maximize the lifetime of the sensor network with the use of CASS-Reliable and multiple sinks. It is also observed that the network lifetime measured in terms of the number of messages delivered successfully remains almost same in comparison to CASS in the presence of unreliable nodes.