A Performance Evaluation of a Novel Energy-Aware Data-Centric Routing Algorithm in Wireless Sensor Networks

In this paper, we present a novel Energy-Aware Data-Centric Routing algorithm for wireless sensor networks, which we refer to as EAD. We discuss the algorithm and its implementation, and report on the performance results of several workloads using the network simulator ns-2. EAD represents an efficient energy-aware distributed protocol to build a rooted broadcast tree with many leaves, and facilitate the data-centric routing in wireless micro sensor networks. The idea is to turn off the radios of all leaf nodes and let the nonleaf nodes be in charge of data aggregation and relaying tasks. The main contribution of this protocol is the introduction of a novel approach based on a low cost backbone provisioning within a wireless sensor network in order to turn off the non backbone nodes and save energy without compromising the connectivity of the network, and thereby extending the network lifetime. EAD makes no assumption on the network topology, and it is based on a residual power. We present an extensive simulation experiments to evaluate the performance of our EAD forwarding-to-parent routing scheme over a tree created by a single EAD execution, and compare it with the routing scheme over a regular Ad hoc On-Demand Distance Vector (AODV) Protocol. Last but not least, we evaluate the performance of our proposed EAD algorithm and compare it to the Low-Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy (LEACH) protocol, a cluster-based, energy-aware routing protocol specifically designed for sensor networks. Our results indicate clearly that EAD outperforms AODV and LEACH in energy conservation, throughput, and network lifetime extension.