Mechanism of Immune System Based Multipath Fault Tolerant Routing Algorithm for Wireless Sensor Networks

It is significant to improve fault tolerance and transmission reliability for improving the overall performance of wireless sensor networks. Related studies on this issue become the hotspot at present. For issues that nodes fault or link quality can affect the transmission stability and reliability of the network, mechanism of immune system based multipath fault tolerant routing algorithm is presented for wireless sensor networks. Firstly, mechanism of immune system is adopted to establish the hierarchical clustering topology with superior performance of clustering compactness. Then nodes’ comprehensive measurement (CM) values are calculated and the contour lines are established among cluster heads according to nodes gradient. Mechanism of immune system is applied to do the variation on the initial antibody population, namely, the multiple disjoint paths, to establish the final optimal transmission paths. Mathematical model is established to do the theoretical analysis on the performance of the algorithm. Through the simulation on the packet receiving rate, accuracy rate, and energy efficiency, the algorithm improves the transmission reliability, energy efficiency of the network, and shows superior performance of fault tolerance. 1. Introduction Reliability of packet transmission is an important index to evaluate the performance of wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Stable topology based routing is established to realize reliable packet transmission which gives consideration to the balance of energy consumption and low transmission delay, and so forth [1]. However, owing to the characteristics of no center network, dynamic topology, source restriction on computing, transmission and energy, as well as the unpredictability of working scenario especially brought by vibration and electromagnetic interference, it often meets the fault of nodes or links which leads to the packet loss or retransmission. This seriously affects the network performance such as the packet receiving rate, accuracy rate, and average transmission delay. Finally, the fault lowers the transmission stability and reliability, weakens the reserved function, and brings great challenges to the existing network technologies [1]. Fault tolerance is the key technology to improve the transmission stability and reliability of the network. It attracts numerous attentions and becomes the hotspot in the study on wireless sensor networks [2]. Network with superior performance has characteristics of reliable data transmission, efficient energy consumption, and low transmission delay. When the