Routing protocol for k-anycast communication in rechargeable wireless sensor networks

a r t i c l e i n f o In this paper, a routing protocol for k-anycast communication based upon the anycast tree scheme is proposed for wireless sensor networks. Multiple-metrics are utilized for instructing the route discovery. A source initiates to create a spanning tree reaching any one sink with source node as the root. Subsequently, we introduce three schemes for k-anycast: a packet is transmitted to exact k sinks, at least k sinks, and at most k sinks, where, a packet can be transmitted to k or more than k sinks benefiting from broadcast technique without wasting the source energy for replicating it. Wireless sensor networks (WSNs), which are comprised of a large number of low-cost, low-power, small size, and multifunctional sensor nodes with finite battery life that can sense and process data and communicate with each other over a short distance [1,2], have been a topic of much interest to researchers due to their wide-ranging applications. For example, they have been used in military field [3], environmental field [4], health field [5], and smart home-field [6], to name a few. In these operations, sensors are utilized for collecting information on entities of their interest, where, efficient routing protocol and data transmission are usually required [7]. In WSNs, as the traffic of the network converges to the sink, nodes close to the sink consume their energy faster than farther nodes because they have to undertake the heavy workload for data forwarding and data collection. Considering the packet delivery is restricted to the nodes around the sink and numerous packets will be accumulated in these nodes in a high data rate network, a solution to this problem is to deploy several sinks in a monitoring field, which poses a new challenge for routing protocol design. Currently, anycast becomes a very useful service for data transmission in multiple sinks. The paradigm of anycast communications [8,9], also termed one-to-any communications, is a newly designed communication service in IPv6, which is used to deliver a packet to any member of a group of designated recipients. Anycast technique plays an important role in the fields of DNS [10], etc. In WSNs, anycast technique can be used for neighbor and sink selection: when a sensor node produces data, it just needs to send it to any neighbor node or sink available. In WSNs with multiple sinks deployed, for reliability, load-balancing and security …