Energy-efficient routing protocol for large scale wireless sensor networks

The traditional routing protocols for mobile ad hoc networks (MANET) are not appropriate for wireless sensor networks (WSNs). The reason is the large amount of overhead produced may exhaust the energy of the network and shorten its lifetime, especially in the process of maintaining routes. In this paper, considering a large scale WSN, we propose a simple but efficient AODV-based protocol, called AODV with Route Identification and RREP Capturing (AODV-RIRC). With route identification the source nodes don´t have to build a new route. And after capturing the RREP the intermediate nodes build routes to the destination silently. The simulation results verify its efficiency in dealing with events in a large scale WSN which consists of 1000 nodes at most. According to the results, AODV-RIRC reduces the control overhead significantly, saves more energy and shortens the route building time relative to the other two AODV-based protocols.