A Routing Method by Reactive Energy Decision in Wireless Sensor Networks

The wireless sensor network (WSN) was extensively deployed and researched recently. While taking the advantage of smaller dimension, lower cost and simple structure of the sensor nodes, more restrictions come with sensors. Therefore, the limited power of sensor nodes is the most direct and difficult problem we meet. The limitation on the energy of sensor nodes creates the bottlenecks when designing the suitable routing protocols. In order to solve the problem of limited energy, the loading of nodes has to be distributed as possible as it could. If the energy consumption can be shared averagely by most nodes, then the lifetime of sensor networks will be enlarged. Thus we propose the routing protocol called Reactive Energy Decision Routing Protocol (REDRP) for the sensor network which considers several representative routing protocols in different structures. This protocol will create the routes in a reactive routing method to transmit the data gathered from nodes and the REDRP will use the residual energy of nodes as the routing decision for energy-aware. The results of simulation show that the more fairness usage of sensor nodes, the more energy consumption of entire network will be distributed by our protocol and the longer the lifetime of nodes.