Cross-Layer Design for Energy-Efficient Reliable Routing in Wireless Sensor Networks

Delivering sensed data to the sink reliably in wireless sensor networks (WSN) calls for a Delivering sensed data to the sink reliably in wireless sensor networks (WSN) calls for a scalable, energy-efficient, and error-resilient routing solution. In this paper, a distributed energy-efficient and reliable routing protocol is proposed using cross-layer design techniques, by jointly considering the routing algorithm in network layer and the power control policy in physical layer. Based on the analysis of how to construct a minimum-power route with the end-to-end reliability constraint in WSN, a distributed cross-layer routing protocol with adaptive transmission power control (DRPC) is proposed. Evaluation results show that our strategy performs better than other routing algorithms in terms of energy efficiency as well as reliability.