Design and Performance Analysis of Energy Aware Routing Protocol for Delay Sensitive Applications for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are emerging network technology with innumerable applications. But security and energy constraints reduce its successful deployments. The nodes in network are greatly involved in transmissions and other processing operations for maintenance other than establishing or handling a call. Due to limited processing ability, storage capacity and most importantly the available battery power of the nodes, it is required to minimize the transmission power and the amount of data transmitted, for efficient operation. This paper presents a power aware routing protocol designed for wireless sensor networks. The proposed routing protocol is an extended and enhanced version of Dynamic Source Routing protocol. It adds energy awareness to the existing implementation of DSR protocol. Energy metric is considered during route selection process to choose an optimal path in terms of overall energy of the nodes along the path, and “low energy notification” method is used during route maintenance process to increase the lifetime of the ʹbridgeʹ nodes to avoid network partitioning. The performance of DSR protocol and Energy Aware DSR (EADSR) protocol are compared through NS2 simulation under different scenarios. In all the cases, it is seen that EADSR protocol out-performs DSR protocol by energy saving in efficient manner.