A Traffic-Aware Energy Efficient Routing Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

This paper introduces an online load balanced energy-aware routing protocol for large-scale wireless sensor networks. The protocol designed, namely traffic-aware energy efficient (TAEE) routing protocol, exploits traffic load information in addition to power residue levels to optimize the load distribution of the entire sensor network, and thus accomplish longer network lifetime. An algorithm for adaptively computing the best parameter for TAEE is also described. Furthermore, to better accommodate larger-scale wireless sensor networks, our TAEE protocol can be adapted to include a random grouping scheme which implements hierarchical routing to reduce computation and routing overhead and to maintain energy efficiency. Our simulation shows that the TAEE protocol generates better performance in terms of network lifetime compared with the leading power-aware Max-min zPmin protocol.