Energy Aware Neighbourhood Protocol for Anycast Routing in Ad Hoc Sensor Networks

Anycast routing offers a flexible paradigm for resource constrained ad hoc networks, where sensors can route data to any available server. The protocol adapted to disseminate network routing information and the selection policy of servers in such a scenario can assist to keep the network operating quiescently, while maximizing network life. This paper proposes an energy aware neighbourhood routing model for energy constrained ad hoc networks. We propose a recursive aggregation scheme that transforms network-wide routing information dissemination problem into a single-hop query protocol that helps nodes to make multihop routing decisions, solely based on the information provided by their single-hop neighbours. Moreover, the model makes energy aware routing decisions by exploiting the number of hops to sink, energy depreciation rate and load profile of individual nodes on the routing path. Results confirm that the proposed technique minimizes packet delivery time and maximum load on any node, while effectively maximizing the throughput.