Energy Efficient Routing Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

In the last few years, Wireless Sensor Networks have gained a lot of interest in the research field. WSNs consist of small nodes with sensing, computation, and wireless communications capabilities. Many routing protocols have been proposed for WSNs. Most of the hierarchical algorithms proposed for WSNs concentrate mainly on maximizing the lifetime of the network by trying to minimize the energy consumption, but delay is also an important metric that should be considered. In this paper, we propose Pairs Energy Efficient Routing protocol (PEER), a new routing protocol for WSNs that uses dual power management and focuses on minimizing both the energy dissipated and the delay cost. We have evaluated the performance of our protocol for two different cases: For all nodes having the same energy level at startup and for nodes starting with different energy levels. In terms of energy consumption, network lifetime, and average delay, our protocol has performed better than LEACH (a well-known hierarchical sensor network protocol) by more than 200%, 200%, and 400% respectively.