Realization of Fault Tolerant Routing Protocol for Zigbee

Problem statement: Increased use of handheld devices and sensor devices pose problems in existing routing protocols. The performance of the existing routing protocols deteriorates very much on these dense scenarios. Control overheads are very important parameter in deciding the performance of routing protocols, which are introduced during route discovery and maintenance process. Denser the network, higher is the control overhead in establishing and maintaining the communication path between end systems. This study aims at implementing an improved fault tolerant routing algorithm that minimizes the routing overhead for ad hoc networks using Zigbee. Approach: We propose a routing protocol which minimizes the routing overhead by exploiting the network density. The number of nodes involved in handling the control packets is minimized in the proposed protocol by selecting few of the neighbors of each node based on the received signal strength. The link breaks are maintained locally, thus by reducing the number of control overheads in the network. Results: The performance of the proposed protocol is tested using OMNet++ simulator. The implementation using Zigbee nodes indicate that the control overhead is reduced up to 80% in dense environments and 60% in heterogeneous and sparse thereby saving energy in the sensor nodes. Conclusion: The proposed protocol increases the energy conservation and hence the nodes life time and networks’ lifetime.