Energy-Efficient Routing Technique for Wireless Sensor Networks Under Energy Constraints

Wireless sensor Networks is grabbing a lot of attention in research due to its various applications. Wireless Sensor Nodes (WSNs) have limited energy stored in its battery. In some applications, replacing the battery is hard and inefficient and replacing the WSNs altogether might be more efficient/economic. In various applications, WSNs are deployed randomly so routing can be inefficient in terms of energy consumption. So, it is desirable to save the energy in the battery as much as possible by assigning optimum transmission power and route to every node. In this paper, we propose an energy-efficient routing algorithm which is based on assigning a path cost to all possible paths and select the minimum-cost path for message transmission. The path cost is calculated according to three parameters: the number of nodes in the path, the total energy per message, and the remaining energy in batteries along the path. A threshold on a battery level is set such that once reached, the protocol stops using nodes with critical energy levels as relays. The proposed scheme showed gains of 15.6% in a network composed of 50 Nodes. These gains increase by increasing the node deployment density.