Fault-Tolerant Energy-Efficient Priority-Based Routing Scheme for the Multisink Healthcare Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are widely used in battle fields, logistic applications, healthcare, habitat monitoring, environmental monitoring, home security, and variety of other areas. The existing routing algorithms focus on the delivery of data packets to the sink using the shortest path; however, calculating the shortest path is not a cost-effective solution while disseminating datasets of interest to the nearest sink node. The approach presented in this paper extends the existing PBR (priority-based routing) protocol by providing a new fault-tolerant multipath priority-based routing (FT-MPPBR) scheme, which not only balances the energy consumption while selecting multiple paths but also balances the workload of the node closest to the sink. The nodes closer to the sink dissipate more energy and can become the source of a communication bottleneck. Simulation results for the proposed routing scheme are encouraging and clearly show that the FT-MPPBR has outperformed the existing PBR schemes in terms of prolonging the network lifetime and reliability. In healthcare sensor networks, timely dissemination of datasets is critical for the well-being of a patient. This research further extends the PBR architecture for supporting computational intensive analysis by transferring datasets of interest to the sensor grid node for improved communication and better throughput.