Distributed energy balanced routing for wireless sensor network using energy prediction metric

A considerable amount of energy efficient routing algorithms have been proposed to save energy and prolong network lifetime. Those algorithms mainly focus on forwarding packets along the minimum energy path to the sink to merely minimize energy consumption, which causes an unbalanced distribution of residual energy among sensor nodes, and eventually results in a network partition. In this paper, we propose a distributed energy balanced routing algorithm using energy prediction metric (EBEP). The routing scheme considers not only efficient energy but also energy balance. Firstly, with the help of Markov chain model and state conversion model, the future residual energy of front neighbor nodes can be predicted so that it is the most important local information when a node makes routing decision. Furthermore, the function of cost is adopted by our EBEP routing algorithm in order to synthetically evaluate and then select the best candidate of next step. Finally, the experimental results demonstrate the performance advantages of our EBEP routing algorithm.