Reliable and energy-efficient cooperative routing algorithm for wireless monitoring systems

The recent increased interest in distributed and flexible wireless pervasive applications has drawn great attention to Wireless Networked Control Systems (WNCS) architectures based on Wireless Sensor and Actuator Networks (WSANs) and the resulting Quality of Service (QoS) obtained in specific applications. In wireless monitoring systems based on WSANs, providing certain QoS specifications in terms of reliability and energy efficiency is crucial for the sensors/actuators as they perform actions based on the data samples/received with a limited amount of energy to spend. To this aim the paper introduces the cooperative-based routing algorithm to guarantee a good performance trade-off between reliability and energy efficiency of the overall wireless monitoring system. Simulations have been carried out in order to quantify the impact of the proposed algorithm on the overall monitoring system reliability and energy efficiency and a comparison is presented with the existing Ad-hoc On-Distance Vector (AODV), the cooperation along the shortest non-cooperative path (CASNCP) and minimum-power cooperative routing (MPCR) algorithms. Finally it is shown the application of the proposed algorithm to healthcare monitoring system pointing out as the cooperation-based routing algorithms are suitable and rewarding for the management of the future generation of monitoring systems.