Novel hierarchical routing protocol in wireless sensor networks.

The Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is one of the major research areas in computer network field today. It is considered as one of ten emerging technologies that will bring far- reaching impacts on the future of humanity lives. In addition, the importance is due to numerous applications that can benefit from the WSN. As a new challenging research field, WSNs are now undergoing intensive research to overcome complexity and constraints. Such constraints include limitation of processors perfomance, memory capacity, power source, and communication bandwidth, in addition to, mobility, network density, and data aggregation issues. According to the mentioned constrains, existing routing protocols cannot be efficiently deployed in WSN directly. The Wireless Sensor Network consists of small, limited resources, inexpensive (low cost), mobile or stationary, and heterogeneous devices deployed automatically at large numbers in areas of interest. The devices dynamically form a network to deliver requested sensed data to the base station (BS) and overcome any arising difficulties without human intervention.This thesis presents a novel hierarchical routing protocol named Self Organizing and Network Survivability (SONS) to provide network fault-tolerance and QoS in the presence of network mobility (mobility of both base station and sensor nodes) applied to the forest fire application. A survey of state of the art WSN routing protocols is presented with focus on network lifetime, reliability, and Quality of Service (QoS). A description of forest fire monitoring is presented as an application scenario. The proposed protocol can operate in heterogeneous networks (in terms of sensed data) and to provide quality of service in terms of packets End-to-End Delay (EED). Simulation studies are performed using open source Object Modular Network Testbed in C++ (OMNeT++) and results are produced. Analysis of the simulation results revealed the superiority of the proposed protocol over existing ones in terms of fault-tolerance, network lifetime, QoS, and scalability, In addition, these results confirm the suitability of SONS routing protocol to the fire forest monitoring application. Analyses of the main features of the proposed algorithm were also carried out. Finally conclusions are presented to draw the future work map. Key words: Wireless Sensor Network, Routing Protocol, Hierarchical, QoS, Fault-tolerance, Redundancy, Survivability, Heterogeneous, scalability.