A Fuzzy System Based Routing Protocol to Improve WSN Performances

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) have become very popular in recent years. Once deployed, WSNs are very rigid in terms of reconfiguration. Software Defined Networking (SDN) technology is being explored by several researchers to facilitate the reconfiguration of WSN nodes. Several architectures have been proposed, among SDN-WISE. SDN-WISE separates the data plane executed by the sensor nodes and the control plane executed by a software program hosted in a controller. In SDN-WISE, the choice of data transmission path is the best path in terms of hops count. One problem with this approach is that the chosen path is used until one of its nodes exhausts its energy before a path change process may be initiated. This impacts network efficiency and reduces the network lifetime. We then propose the Fuzzy Routing Protocol (FRP) which relies on the fuzzy system to compute a cost based on the metrics residual energy, RSSI, number of packets in the queue (buffer) and number of hops to reach the sink, to calculate the cost of each node. Nodes with the high cost close to sink are chosen to form the path. When a node in the path used for data transmission has its cost decreased by K% compared to its previous cost, then a new path is computed even if it is less optimal in terms of number of hops compared to the previous one. This approach allows a better distribution of energy consumption in the network and better congestion management.