An efficient energy aware routing protocol for real time traffic in wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor network (WSN) have recently been extensively deployed and researched. They are composed of a high number of small and simple nodes where most of them have to function as a router in an ad hoc manner. Because of limited energy sources in sensor network node, routing protocols should save the energy as much as possible. Energy consumption has a direct influence on network lifetime. From the quality of service (QoS) point of view, in many applications such as real time one, it is necessary to consider application QoS requirements. In this paper we propose an energy aware routing protocol for real time traffic in wireless sensor networks. The proposed protocol considers both energy and delay metric to find an optimal path with minimum energy consumption and minimum end to end delay. Simulation results show that the proposed protocol is successful in low energy consumption and satisfying low end to end delay which makes it suitable for real time applications.