Energy-Efficient Real-Time Routing in Wireless Sensor Networks

Because distributed micro-sensing involves direct interaction with a physical environment, data communication in wireless sensor networks often has timing constraints in the form of deadlines, which represent a new generation of real-time data communications from traditional networked systems. In this work we discuss energy problems of an existing real-time routing protocol LNA. Based on LNA, we propose an energy-efficient real-time routing (ERTR) protocol, which supports energy-efficient real-time data transmitting in wireless sensor networks. ERTR maximize the number of messages that can reach the BS where each message has its own due-date by minimizing the maximal lateness of all messages. ERTR also average the energy of node to increase the energy efficiency of wireless sensor networks according to the maximum entropy principle. Detailed simulations of representative sensor network environments demonstrate that ERTR reduces the number of deadlines missed compared to LNA.