An energy-efficient sensor routing scheme for home automation networks

In the emerging ubiquitous home, sensors are placed everywhere in the house and collect various physical data such as temperature, humidity, and light to provide information to consumer electronics devices. The devices are then automatically activated if necessary. For example, the ventilator works when the air is foul and the heating system performs according to the weather and the existence of people in the house. Because sensors have limited battery power, energy-efficient routing is important. In this paper, we present a new sensor routing scheme that provides energy-efficient data delivery from sensors to the home base station. The proposed scheme divides the home area into sectors and locates a manager node to each sector. The manager node receives collected data from sensors and delivers the data to the base station through the shortest path of the 2-dimensional (x, y) coordinates. Performance results show that the proposed scheme reduces energy consumption significantly compared with conventional sensor routing schemes.