Real-time power-aware routing protocol for wireless sensor network

Abstract

Recent advances in wireless technology have enabled the design of tiny low-cost sensor modules. Many applications may need real-time data transmission such as imaging and video data transmission which requires provision of Quality of Service (QoS) of the communication network. In this paper, we have presented a Real-Time Power-Aware (RTPA) routing protocol that is energy efficient and support real-time application. The presented protocol uses a geographic approach and considers the remaining energy and the delay to selects the suitable or the best route from the set of available routes between a source node and a destination node. In addition, the protocol uses two route decision components: one for Real-Time (RT) traffic and the other for Non-Real-Time (NRT) traffic. For RT traffic, the protocol looks for a delay constrained path with the least possible cost based on packet urgency. In NRT traffic, the protocol looks for a path based on a cost function. Through simulation, we show that RTPA protocol improves the packet delivery ratio and the network lifetime compared to other protocols. Also, the performance of RTPA protocol remains very good even in large networks, and also scales with density. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.