Fuzzy Logic Based Distance and Energy-Aware Routing Protocol in Delay-Tolerant Mobile Sensor Networks

In challenged networks such as Wireless Sensor Networks, limitations such as nodes mobility, short radio range and sparse network density can prevent communications among nodes. Consequently, it can result in long delays in exchanging messages among nodes. Designing Delay-Tolerant Networks is considered to be an approach for dealing with lengthy breakdown of communication between nodes. Using multi-replica methods seems rational for these networks. However, a majority of these methods inject a large amount of replications of a message in the network so as to enhance message delivery probability which consequently leads to the loss of energy and reduction of network efficiency. Two major issues should be considered to achieve data delivery in such challenging networking environments: a routing strategy for the network and a buffer management policy. This study proposes a new routing protocol called Fuzzy-Logic based Distance and Energy Aware Routing protocol (FLDEAR) in delay tolerant mobile sensor network. A FLDEAR is a distance and energy aware protocol that reduces the number of message replications and uses two fuzzy inference systems in routing and buffer management. The results of conducted simulations indicated that this routing algorithm can be used for enhancing data packet delivery ratios and reducing data transmission overhead than several current Delay-Tolerant Mobile Sensor Networks routing protocols.