An Optimized Energy-aware Routing Protocol for Wireless Sensor Network

Because sensor nodes typically are battery-powered and in most cases it may not be possible to change or recharge batteries, the key challenge in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) design is the energy-efficiency and how to deal with the trade-off between it and the QoS parameters required by some applications. This paper studies the QoS of an energy-efficient cluster-based routing protocol called Energy-Aware routing Protocol (EAP) in terms of lifetime, delay, loss percentage, and throughput, and proposes some modifications on it to enhance its performance. The modified protocol offers better characteristics in terms of packets loss, delay, and throughput, but slightly affects lifetime negatively. Simulation results showed that the modified protocol significantly outperforms EAP in terms of packet loss percentage by on average 93.4%.