Real-time gradient Cost Establishment (RT-GRACE) for an energy-aware routing in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) comprise of tiny and resource-constrained sensor nodes that communicate with each other, through unreliable wireless links. In many applications areas of WSNs, real-time forwarding is required that means that data must be delivered to sink within a specified time frame. This paper proposes an energy-aware real-time routing protocol with gradient cost field establishment. The proposed protocol can also be used in the non-real-time data applications. The proposed protocol ensures long lifetime of the overall network with a predefined reliability and throughput. In the proposed approach, data reaches the sink from a source, by selecting a routing path in such a way that it takes into account residual energy of the nodes in the selected routing path along with the deadline of the data packet and quality of wireless links. Simulation results show that the proposed approach is better than other notable real-time routing strategies found in the literature in terms of network lifetime and throughput.