Energy-aware interference-sensitive geographic routing in wireless sensor networks

Energy conservation and interference reduction are the two ultimate goals in the design of network protocols for wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Energy-aware geographic routing has been considered as an attractive routing scheme for energy conservation in WSNs owing to its desirable scalability and simplicity. However, most energy-aware geographic routing protocols seldom consider interference reduction. The authors present an energy-aware interference-sensitive geographic routing (EIGR) protocol, which focuses on minimising the total network energy consumption and reducing interference. EIGR adaptively uses an anchor list to guide data delivery, and selects the minimum-interference link from energy-optimal relay region for data delivery. To further reduce the energy consumption and interference, EIGR adjusts the transmission power of each forwarding node so as just to reach the selected next forwarding node. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed approach exhibits noticeably higher energy efficiency, shorter end-to-end delay and higher packet delivery ratio compared with other geographic routing protocols.