Near-Minimum-Energy Routing in Heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Networks

Routing is an essential operation in wireless sensor networks. Most existing routing protocols are designed for homogeneous sensor networks. Recent studies show that a homogeneous sensor network has a poor fundamental performance limit. To achieve better performance, we adopt a Heterogeneous Sensor Network (HSN) model. In this paper, we present an efficient NEar-optiMal rOuting (NEMO) protocol for HSNs. We evaluate the performance of NEMO through extensive simulation experiments. Our results show that NEMO can find near-optimal routes in an HSN and has very small overhead.