Coordinate based routing algorithm for wireless sensor networks

Power management in wireless sensor networks has always been a concern for network engineers and hardware manufacturers. Wireless sensor nodes are supposed to operate for extended periods of time, perhaps years, without physical interaction from human beings. Replacing batteries is also not possible or is an inconvenience in most of these networks. Thus, in order to extend the life of entire wireless sensor network system, either higher capacity of batteries needs to be used on each node or the energy consumption of batteries itself needs to be reduced. Energy consumption, from a software point of view, may be reduced both logically and physically by minimizing the involvements of nodes while transferring data from source to destination, which is decided by the routing protocol. This paper proposes a routing protocol that is based on coordinate mathematics. The path selected to transfer the data from source to destination is almost the shortest active path. Generally, this routing protocol at maximum, only sends the information to two of its neighboring nodes, while not influencing other neighboring nodes in idle state. Beside this, location of all the nodes are previously assigned, so the physical location of source node can be easily located for further procedure. This paper, in summary, proposes a routing protocol designed to sort out two key issues of wireless sensor networks namely power conservation and locating the nodes that have detected information that needs to update.