Efficient energy-aware mechanisms for real-time routing in wireless sensor networks

Abstract

We propose three mechanisms to manage nodes energy and improve the efficiency of real-time routing protocols in sensor networks. To preserve nodes' resources and to improve network fluidity, the first mechanism removes each useless packet due to its insufficient deadline in reaching the sink. To reinforce the packet real-time aspect, the second mechanism selects from the current-node queue the most urgent packet to be forwarded first. For a better node energy balancing, the third mechanism uses both the residual energy and the relay speed of the forwarding candidate neighbour to select the next forwarder of the current packet. These mechanisms are simple to implement, require very little states and rely only on local primitives. In addition they can be easily integrated in any geographic routing protocol. Associated with the real-time routing protocol SPEED in TinyOS and evaluated in the simulator TOSSIM, our proposals achieved good performance in terms of node energy balancing, packet loss ratio and energy consumption. © 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland.