An Adaptive Energy Efficient Forwarding Protocol for wireless sensor networks

Extensive research has been done on reliable data forwarding in sensor networks. Existing protocols provide reliability at the cost of high energy consumption. In this paper, we propose to develop an Adaptive Energy Efficient Forwarding Protocol (AEEFP) with the aim of keeping the energy consumption low while achieving high reliability. In our proposed protocol, the data forwarding probability is adaptively determined based on the measured loss conditions. Since energy consumption is minimized, the network lifetime is maximized. Since the source rebroadcast the data, until the packet loss is minimized, high data reliability is achieved. By simulation results we show that the proposed protocol achieves high reliability while ensuring low energy consumption and overhead.