Wireless sensor networks are the evolutionary self-organizing multi-node networks. Due to dynamic network conditions and stochastically varying network environments, routing in WSNs is critically affected and needs to be optimized. The routing strategies developed for WSNs must be efficient to make it an operationally self-configurable network. For this we need to resort to near shortest path evaluation. Therefore, some soft computing approaches that can calculate the near shortest path available in an affordable computing time are required. WSNs have a high computational environment with limited and precise transmission range, processing, and limited energy sources. The sever power constraints strongly affect the existence of active nodes and hence the network lifetime. So, here, the authors use the power of soft computing because the potential features of soft-computing (SC) approach highly address their adaptability and compatibility to overwhelm the complex challenges in WSNs.
TopWireless Sensor Network
Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is a network of distributed autonomous devices that are called sensors or nodes that are performs sensing, computing and wirelessly communicating with each other. Nodes in this Network have constrained like power, memory and their computations. The lifetime of Wireless Sensor Network mainly depends on the battery power. A Wireless Sensor Network is based on ad-hoc networks, where each node transfers data to and from an Access Point that is connected to the Internet by a wired or wireless network. Also, the network is flexible i.e. the size of nodes are adding & deleting of nodes so the network size is unpredictable. The Access Points need not be in the reach of all the nodes in the network. Nodes around the Access Points forward the data from the faraway nodes to the Access Point.
If there are many nodes in the network, distant nodes can send data with the help of Access Point. Apart from mobility, Wireless Networks have some advantages that they can work in a distributed fashion & are cheap with minimum investment for initial infrastructure, more reliable, scalable and can easily increased coverage therefore they are widely used in campus networks, metropolitan area networks, transportation system, security. Therefore works better than traditional networks. Different routing approaches have been used by these networks called multi constraint routing. These constraints are a path which may contains many hops to reach to a destination. Also there are so many issues related to multicast routing approach like scalability in wireless networks, overall optimal performance and cross network routing etc.
Selecting the shortest path between source and sink is not always mean optimal routing in WSNs. The scarce power in sensors challenges the routing protocol in WSNs. Mainly the lifetime of a wireless network is dependent on the power of nodes, Therefore a power awareness based routing algorithms should be introduced to increasing WSN power and hence extend the network life time. Because of WSNs constrains and limitations, design of routing protocols for WSNs is challenging.
TopRouting In Wireless Networks
Traditional WSN routing protocol works in three types:
In the above approaches, which one to opt is totally depend on the network structure.