A load-balanced and energy-aware routing metric for wireless multimedia sensor networks

As a novel information acquiring and processing technology, wireless multimedia sensor networks (WMSNs) pose new challenges on the routing protocol. IEEE 802.11s-based WMSN that integrate with MAC-layer mesh networking protocol is an innovative implementation for WMSN which can offer high coverage, self-organization and good reliability. In this paper, we present a new routing metric based on airtime proposed in IEEE 802.11s draft standard, referred to as load balanced airtime with energy awareness (LBA-EA), for IEEE 802.11s-based WMSNs. LBA-EA not only captures the link quality, but also takes into account the load balancing and energy consumption. Simulation results prove the effectiveness of the proposed routing metric in terms of average network throughput and overall lifetime of WMSNs.