Smart packet: Energy efficient multi-hop routing protocol

The vital part to prolong the active time of Wireless Senor Network (WSN) is to reduce the transmission energy consumption between individual nodes/path belonging to the network. In order to minimize the transmission energy consumption in the network, a novel methodology called a “sleeping pill” packet into the network has been proposed. This technique has reduced 4% of energy consumption in a transmission experiment for 10,000 packets at -25dBm transmission power. This transmission experiment was carried out by transmitting a new packet of size 108 bytes for every 3 seconds leading to a total transmission time of 8 hours 33 minutes. This methodology has a potential to increase the lifetime of the network to about 60% for multi-hop multipath routing protocols. These measurements and comparisons are first step towards energy efficient multi-hop routing protocol in a mesh network. This study also investigates various connectivity issues and energy consumption scenario that prevail in real world situation. The experiments were done and analyzed various performance issues which arise due to deployment/distribution of the sensor for the multi-hop network according to the environment. These experiments provide more insights to reduce the packet loss and effective energy utilization of the nodes in the network. One of the focuses of this research work is on establishing the correlation between Link Quality Indicator (LQI) values to the Packet delivery ratio (PDR) based on environment. These methodical analyses play an important role in energy efficient mesh routing protocol and deployment.