Cost-Aware Dynamic Routing Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks - Design and Prototype Experiments

This paper presents an energy-efficient multi-hop routing protocol for wireless sensor networks. The protocol uses cost metrics to create gradients from a source to a destination node. The cost metrics consist of energy, node load, delay, and link reliability information that provide a trade-off between performance and energy usage. A node can query routes from its neighbors, which allows efficient recovery from route losses. The protocol is the first cost-field based WSN routing protocol suitable for low processing and memory capacity nodes that is tested in a practical real-world environment. The protocol performance is evaluated on full scale prototype implementation consisting of 38 ultra-low power nodes in indoor environment. Compared to traditional flooding, the protocol requires only 25% of the bandwidth, while having smaller end-to-end delays