A Novel Real-Time Power Aware Routing Protocol in Wireless Sensor Networks

One of the most important and challenging issues in real-time applications of resource-constrained wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is providing end-to-end delay requirement. To address such an issue a few QoS routing protocols have been proposed. THVR (Two-Hop Velocity based routing protocol) is newly proposed real-time protocol while it is based on the concept of using two-hop neighbor information for routing decision. In this paper we propose a novel real-time Power-Aware Two-Hop (PATH) based routing protocol. PATH improves real-time performance by means of reducing the packet dropping in routing decisions. PATH is based on the concept of using two-hop neighbor information and power-control mechanism. The former is used for routing decisions and the latter is deployed to improve link quality as well as reducing the delay. PATH dynamically adjusts transmitting power in order to reduce the probability of packet dropping. Also PATH addresses practical issue like network holes, scalability and loss links in WSN's. We simulate PATH and compare it with THVR. Our simulation results show that PATH can perform better than THVR in term of energy consumption and delay.