A self-adaptive energy-aware data gathering mechanism for wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Sensor networks are composed of a large number of densely deployed sensors. The sensor nodes are self-organized and form an ad hoc network. As the energy supply to sensor nodes is limited and cannot be replenished, energy efficiency is an important design consideration for sensor networks. We design and evaluate an energy efficient routing algorithm for data querying sensor networks that propagates routing instructions and build data paths by considering both the hop count to the sink node and the minimum residual energy of that path. The proposed Dynamic Energy Aware Routing (DEAR) algorithm can effectively choose a data path with low energy consumption and high residual energy. The simulation results show that DEAR can prolong the lifetime of networks compared with Directed Diffusion, Minimum Transmission Energy routing and Energy Aware Routing. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.