A constrained shortest-path energy-aware routing algorithm for wireless sensor networks

While traditional routing protocols try to minimize the end-to-end delay or maximize the throughput, most energy-aware routing protocols for wireless sensor networks try to extend the life time of the network by minimizing the energy consumption sacrificing other performance metrics. We introduce a new energy-aware routing protocol that tries to minimize the energy consumption and, at the same time, maintain good end-to-end delay and throughput performance. The new algorithm is based on a constrained shortest-path algorithm. We compare the new algorithm with some traditional routing and energy-aware routing algorithms. The results show that the new algorithm performance is acceptable under all performance metrics and presents a performance balance between the traditional routing algorithms and the energy-aware routing algorithms. The constraint value can be chosen to achieve different performance objectives for different sensor network missions.