Energy-Harvesting Aware Multi-Hop Routing in Wireless Sensor Networks for Defense Applications

In today's critical situation, wireless sensor networks have attracted much attention as one of the newest communication technologies for use in passive defense applications. In this regard, the limited energy  resources of these networks and consequently their limited network lifetime, is a serious problem in  applying them for such critical applications. Recently with the advent of energy harvesting methods, it has become possible to overcome this problem. In this paper, a new cluster-based multipath routing protocol called R-DEARER is proposed for use in energy harvesting wireless sensor networks. In this protocol,  inter-cluster routing is used to make possible the multi-hop communication between cluster heads and the sink. For this purpose, the cluster-heads send their collected data packets to relay cluster-heads that are near the sink and then the relay cluster-heads send packets to the sink. By using this method, the energy consumption of the cluster-head nodes will be reduced; therefore, the network lifetime and energy efficiency will be increased significantly. The performance of the proposed protocol is examined by analyzing and evaluating the numerical results. The results show that in terms of energy efficiency, packet delivery rate, and network outage probability, the proposed R-DEARER protocol performs better than the same method in which the communication from cluster-heads to the sink is single hop.