Energy Efficient Routing Protocol for Wireless Sensor and Actor Networks

Wireless Sensor and Actor Networks (WSANs) are composed of heterogeneous nodes referred to as sensors and actors. Sensors are low-cost, low-power, multi-functional devices that communicate untethered in short distances. Actors collect and process sensor data and perform appropriate actions on the environment. Hence,actors are resource-rich devices equipped with higher processing and transmission capabilities, and longer battery life. In WSANs, the collaborative operation of the sensors enables the distributed sensing of a physical phenomenon. After sensors detect an event in the deployment field, the event data is distributively processed and transmitted to the actors, which gather, process, and eventually reconstruct the event data. WSANs can be considered a distributed control system designed to react to sensor information with an effective and timely action. For this reason, in WSANs it is important to provide real-time coordination and communication to guarantee timely execution of the right actions and energy efficiency of the networking protocols is also a major concern, since sensors are resource-constrained devices. We propose an energy efficient routing protocol for wireless sensor and actor networks to cope with these challenges keeping in mind the resource constraints of the network and the early response by the actor nodes for delay sensitive applications with number of transmissions as less as possible. Our protocol is based on clustering (virtual grid) and Voronoi region concept.