An Energy and Fault Aware Mechanism of Wireless Sensor Networks Using Multiple Mobile Agents

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks find several applications in hard-to-reach areas. As sensors have limited battery power, many energy aware protocols based on negotiation, clustering, and agents have been developed to increase lifetime of the network. This article finds limitation with some multi-agent-based protocols as they place the sink node at the centre of the monitoring region which is quite difficult in hard-to-reach areas. Therefore, a multi-agent-based energy and fault-aware protocol for hard-to-reach territories (MAHT) is proposed which uses technique of impact factor to identify the high power capability of the central node and dynamic itinerary planning to make the protocol fault tolerant. Its agent migration technique results in improvement ofn energy efficiency, task completion time and network lifetime. MAHT is simulated using Castalia simulator and the impact of payload size, network size, node failures, etc., on various performance metrics is analysed. The proposed protocol found outperforming over the existing ones.