Energy efficient routing for achieving shorter latency in sensor networks

In wireless sensor networks, it is an important task to periodically collect data from an area of interest for time-sensitive applications. The sensed data must be gathered and transmitted to a base station for further processing to meet the end-user queries. Since the network consists of low-cost nodes with limited battery power, it is a challenging task to design an efficient routing scheme that can minimize delay and offer good performance in energy efficiency, and long network lifetimes. In this paper, we propose a new routing protocol, called Degree-Constrained Minimal Spanning Tree (DCMST), to collect information efficiently. DCMST is efficient in the ways that it ensures maximal utilization of network energy, it makes the lifetime of the network longer, as well as it takes much lower time to complete a round. Simulation results show that DCMST achieves around 20% better performance than that of COSEN in respect of delay time. It also shows that DCMST can perform better than COSEN in total transmission distance, which implies the less total energy consumption. Therefore, our DCMST scheme gives a good compromise between energy efficiency and latency.