An Energy Efficient-Delay Aware Routing Algorithm in Multihop Wireless Sensor Networks

Minimizing energy consumption is one of the challenging issues in design of wireless sensor networks especially when nodes are energy constrained. In such networks, another important design consideration is delay minimization. However, appropriate trade-off between these goals is required since they are conflicting in nature and simultaneous optimization is not possible without sacrificing one of them. This paper presents a new Delay Aware-Energy Efficient Routing Algorithm (abbreviated as DA-EERA) that makes a fine trade-off between these aforesaid goals while selecting next hop node. A van Emde Boastree (vEB-tree) based next hop selection procedure is proposed here. It takes into account link energy, path load and single hop delay in the decision process for minimizing both energy consumption of the network and network delay. Moreover, a weight factor is introduced for incorporating flexibility between the two conflicting goals according to the design needs. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm improves significantly the performance metrics, viz., average energy consumption of network, average delay and network delay, compared to other existing routing algorithms.