An energy efficient routing strategy for Wireless Sensor Networks

In this paper, a novel energy-aware routing strategy for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) is developed. The proposed strategy improves on the Self Healing Routing protocol (SHR), by periodically switching off different sensors while maintaining a small number of active nodes. These active nodes are carefully selected via a negotiation protocol to achieve proper terrain coverage. The proposed strategy is implemented and integrated into the SENSE simulation environment [1]. Experimental results illustrate the tradeoff between different performance parameters and the improvement in network lifetime. Different scenarios are implemented to study the effect of the number of active nodes as well as the scheduling time for inactive ones. The presented results can serve as a guide for selecting operating parameters in different scenarios.