Resilient Multi-Sink, Multipath Routing for Mobility-Limited Wireless Sensor Networks in Hostile Event Monitoring

The demand for continuous observation of remote and inaccessible natural and artificial areas is increasing due to the escalating adverse effects of climate change and human activities. Surveillance and timely detection of phenomena such as flash floods, wildfires, landslides, and pollution are critical to human life, the natural environment, and infrastructure preservation. Advancements in wireless communication, computing, sensing, and energy storage have paved the way for wireless sensor networks (WSNs), a technology capable of monitoring such phenomena. A WSN consists of autonomous sensing devices that communicate wirelessly to deliver information hop by hop, via routing to a distinguished entity called a sink. Hostile events of spatial extent can destroy individual devices and disrupt communication and monitoring. This study proposes the Multi-sink Reliable Resilient Multipath Routing Protocol (MsR2MRP), which can deliver information to multiple sinks to increase resiliency and construct multiple paths to avoid danger zones and to mitigate failures. The protocol also supports constrained locomotion, a technique WSN nodes employ to evade damage by hostile events and to prolong the network’s lifetime. MsR2MRP utilizes sensor, energy, communication, and mobility information to maintain WSN-level monitoring capabilities even during mobility and hostile events. Furthermore, this study proposes a heuristic model for constrained locomotion in WSNs. Finally, this study evaluates the proposed solution with a state-of-the-art routing protocol from the literature and comprehensively analyzes its sensing abilities. Simulation results show that MsR2MRP outperforms the benchmark protocol in terms of monitoring performance and network lifetime.