Betweenness centrality based connectivity aware routing algorithm for prolonging network lifetime in wireless sensor networks

Network lifetime is the key design parameter for wireless sensor network protocols. In recent years, based on energy efficient routing techniques numerous methods have been proposed for enhancing network lifetime. These methods have mainly considered residual energy, number of hops and communication cost as route selection metrics. This paper introduces a method for further improvement in the network lifetime by considering network connectivity along with energy efficiency for the selection of data transmission routes. The network lifetime is enhanced by preserving highly connected nodes at initial rounds of data communication to ensure network connectivity during later rounds. Bassed on the above mentioned concept, a connectivity aware routing algorithm: CARA has been proposed. In the proposed algorithm, connectivity factor of a node is calculated on the basis of Betweenness centrality of a node and energy efficient routes are found by using fuzzy logic and ant colony optimization. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm CARA performs better than other related state-of-the-art energy efficient routing algorithms viz. FML, EEABR and FACOR in terms of network lifetime, connectivity, energy dissipation, load balancing and packet delivery ratio.