Energy analysis of routing protocols in wireless sensor networks for industrial applications

Wireless sensor network technology is rapidly becoming a feasible solution for monitoring and control applications at the lowest level of manufacturing automation systems. Sensor nodes are energy constrained and therefore designing the communication network should be in such a way that the electronic circuitry consumes minimum energy from the node resource and hence increase the network life time. However, the design of routing protocol of wireless sensor networks is highly application specific and hence the communication protocol should be developed according to the environmental factors of the system. In this paper, an energy analysis of routing protocols is presented and it is shown that for industrial applications such as in a die casting factory, developing routing techniques is highly dependent on the system factors such as the transmission frequency, the number of nodes, the distances between the machines and the message length. The final routing protocol can be determined based on the developed analysis and simulation techniques.