Delay Aware and Lifetime Enhanced Sectoring (DALES) Routing Protocol for Heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Network

Background & Objective: Wireless communication technologies are continually growing in diverse areas, which are providing unexampled research opportunities in the areas of networking. One such speedily developing orbit is Wireless Sensor Networks. The ability of these networks to operate in human-inaccessible terrains and hazardous locations have attracted a lot of research for addressing various difficulties presented by these networks at different layers. Routing is a challenge due to the unpredictable topology of WSNs. Further, there exists a wide range of applications employing WSNs which operate in a hostile environment. The presence of a hostile environment literally means that the operating devices fail quite frequently and it is practically infeasible to repair them and replenish their energy resources. Further, many real-time applications of WSN do not tolerate any latency in the network. In general, designing an energy-efficient routing scheme that can tradeoff between different design metrics, like delay, is a crucial issue in WSNs. Due to a great deal of speculations and future prognoses regarding the Internet of Things, WSN design faces various design goals that often conflict with each other, such as short delay, high throughput, minimal energy consumption, and low cost. Network design for futuristic applications must consider many factors for achieving trade-offs among multiple objectives to achieve optimal performance for network. Methods: This paper proposes a routing protocol named Delay Aware and Lifetime Enhanced Sectoring (DALES) for joint optimization of lifetime and delay in a heterogeneous WSN. It alters the CH selection process by sectoring the WSN field, barring certain nodes from participating in clustering and selecting an optimal number of CHs by use of modified probability equations. Conclusion: Simulation results establish that proposed solution ameliorates in terms of network lifetime and delay as compared to other routing protocols.