Abstract
Broadcasting is a fundamental operation in wireless sensor networks and is used for querying, key distribution, time synchronization, routing, and node localization. Nevertheless, sensors are prone to failures such as software or hardware malfunctioning, exhaustion of energy, and environmental hazards. In this paper, a review of realistic dominated connected set with multipoint relay (RDS-MPR) is performed. Then, an enhancement of this method, called reliable relay-based broadcasting (RRB), is proposed. RRB improves RDS-MPR by considering a trusted index for each node, which is updated during the data gathering process at the sink node. In addition, the use of formal concept analysis in RRB provides the best sorting of nodes according to their weights, which helps to refine selection of relay nodes compared with RDS-MPR. The effectiveness of the proposed scheme is measured through a simulation study using NS-2. Copyright (c) 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.