Path energy weight: A global energy-aware routing protocol for wireless sensor networks

Recent development in the field of Wireless communications and electronics has enabled the deployment of Wireless sensor Networks (WSNs) in an expanding variety of applications. Significantly, wireless communications have demonstrated profound significance in a variety of applications ranging from military to health applications and from home to industry. In WSNs, a major goal is conserving the sensor nodes´ energy and thus maximizing the network lifetime. Several energy efficient routing protocols have been proposed in the literature. However, in these protocols, a path is selected based on the local energy view of a sensor node. In this paper, we propose an energy-efficient routing protocol that selects a communication path based on the global energy view of the network. The path selection criterion is based on an energy-weight function to reflect how balanced is the energy distribution among all nodes along the path. The energy weight function estimates the energy weight of different paths and the communication path with the best energy weight is selected. Simulation results indicate clearly that compared to the routing protocol in, our proposed protocol distributes the energy consumption evenly among the network nodes and thus maximizes the network life time.