An energy-aware routing for maximum lifetime in wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Due to the nature of many-to-one or many-to-few traffic patterns in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), some critical nodes overloaded will exhaust their energy fast and will cause the decrease of the network lifetime for WSNs. Typically, routing protocols employ a reliable routing cost metric to avoid the lossy links but cannot balance the energy consumption of different nodes in WSNs. In this paper, we present an energy-aware routing algorithm to maximize the network lifetime of WSNs with the introduction of a new routing cost metric, whose goal is to achieve the best trade-off between energy consumption and routing link selection. We evaluate the performance of our routing algorithm by comparing it with other accessible routing algorithms. And the simulation results show that this energy-aware routing algorithm performs better in network lifetime as well as reliability. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.