A Trust-based Framework for Congestion-aware Energy Efficient Routing in Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks

A new era in wireless sensor network technology has been ushered in through the introduction of multimedia sensor networks, which has a major bottleneck in the form of network congestion. Congestion occurs when resources are in high demand during the active period while the data processing and transmission speeds lag behind the speed of the incoming traffic. This may disrupt normal network operations by buffer overflow, packet loss, increased latency, excessive energy consumption and even worse, a collapse of the entire operation. In this paper we propose a novel Trust Integrated Congestion-aware Energy Efficient Routing algorithm (TCEER) in which the potential of a node is computed using its trust value, congestion status, residual energy, distance from the current packet-forwarding node and the distance from the base station using a Fuzzy Logic Controller. The source node selects the node of highest potential in its one hop radio range for data transmission. Hop by hop data routing from source to base station is obtained which is lightweight as well as energy-efficient. Finally, the merits of the proposed scheme are discussed by comparing it with the existing protocols and the study shows promising improvements in network performance.