Energy-Efficient Oriented Routing Algorithm in Wireless Sensor Networks

The design and implementation of healthcare system using sensor network technology has been one of the most active research topics currently. The research on wireless sensor network mostly focuses on energy saving, such as duty cycle scheduling, and path routing, such as routing protocol for low power and lossy networks (RPL) which however only takes into account a single metric, reliability or energy, as routing decision. If RPL only considers the reliability metric, nodes will suffer from uneven energy. If it only considers the energy metric, nodes will suffer from the rise of packet loss ratio. In this paper, we propose an energy-oriented routing mechanism to improve RPL routing protocol by combining the expected transmission count (ETX) and remaining energy metrics. The simulation will be conducted to analyze the performance of the proposed mechanism.