Energy Efficient and Reliable Routing Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks

Energy efficient and reliable data forwarding becomes important if resources are limited such as in wireless sensor networks. Although directed diffusion, a data centric routing approach is widely used in wireless sensor networks,it is inefficient in terms of reliability and energy efficiency. In this paper we present a new routing scheme for wireless sensor networks, in which routing is based on radio-aware metric, which contains radio information at the medium access control (MAC) layer. In this new routing scheme, data are forwarded to a designated neighbor, instead of flooding exploratory data into the whole network like with directed diffusion. Simulation results show that compared to directed diffusion, our proposed routing scheme is almost 4.3 times more efficient in terms of energy consumption and 2.6 times more reliable in terms of data delivery. Our work relies on interaction between routing and MAC layers, with the overall goal of achieving energy efficiency and reliability through cross layer optimization.