A Routing Protocol for WSN Based on the Implementation of Source Routing for Minimum Cost Forwarding Method

Abstract

Abstract-This paper presents a new routing protocol for wireless sensor networks (WSN), established on the basis of fundamental concepts in source based routing for ad hoc networks and minimum cost forwarding (MCF) methods for heterogeneous WSNs. Neither routing tables nor network topology information is maintained at sensor level, which makes the proposed protocol part of the reactive routing protocols class. Despite the lack of network information at the sensor, the packets from the sink node to sensors, and viceversa, always follow the optimal communication path with minimum cost. Simulation results have shown that the proposed protocol performs better than MCF protocol alone, and nodes always route the packets through the optimal path up to destination. In fact, according to the energy consumption and throughput found by simulation, this protocol improves on the MCF protocol for applications where the sink node, acting as a server or base station (BS), generates significant amounts of network traffic. All results are based on simulations and data treatment performed with OMNet++ 4, Matlab 7 and Microsoft Visual Studio2010(C#) platform tools.