Design of an enhanced energy conserving routing protocol based on route diversity in wireless sensor networks

This paper presents a new Energy Conserving Routing Protocol (ECRP) that aims to optimize the transmission cost over a path from a source to a defined destination in a Wireless Sensor Network. Energy consumption remains a significant metric related to the service lifetime of a Wireless Sensor Network. This parameter is included in our model in order to generate a set of maximally disjoint paths between each sensor and the sink, so as to avoid or partially reduce the appearance of congestion in the network. We aim to spread the data traffic over non-overlapping paths in order to increase the global network lifetime. Simulations have shown that our ECRP is more efficient than existing protocols in terms of congestion avoidance and energy saving.