Probabilistic protocols for fair communication in wireless sensor networks

In this work we present three new distributed, probabilistic data propagation protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks which aim at maximizing the network's operational life and improve its performance. The keystone of these protocols' design is fairness which declares that fair portions of network's work load should be assigned to each node, depending on their role in the system. All the three protocols, EFPFR, MPFR and TWIST, emerged from the study of the rigorously analyzed protocol PFR. Its design elements were identified and improvements were suggested and incorporated into the introduced protocols. The experiments conducted show that our proposals manage to improve PFR's performance in terms of success rate, total amount of energy saved, number of alive sensors and standard deviation of the energy left. Indicatively we note that while PFR's success rate is 69.5%, TWIST is achieving 97.5% and its standard deviation of energy is almost half of that of PFR. © 2008 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.