Abstract
In recent decades, cluster-based schemes have emerged as viable solutions for energy conservation problem in wireless sensor networks (WSN). However, most of the existing solutions incur imbalanced energy consumption and high network overheads. In addition, existing cluster-based solutions do not optimize route discovery based on the restricted resources of sensor nodes. Moreover, most of the cluster-based solutions perform periodical re-clustering for load balancing, which results in shortening network lifetime. This research paper presents a Dynamic Energy-aware Fault Tolerant Routing (DEFTR) protocol that exploits uniform-sized network partitioning based on network size and utilizes a multi-facet routing mechanism, which takes into consideration the residual energy, and position and link quality of neighbors. Furthermore, DEFTR not only offers reliable and energy efficient data routing but also supports fault tolerance. Simulation results demonstrate that DEFTR improved the network lifetime by 20.9% and throughput by 35%, also it reduced the delay by 29% and transmission cost by 46% in comparison to the existing work. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.