Energy Balancing Routing Schemes for Low-Power Wireless Networks

We address the problem of energy balancing in multi-hop wireless networks to optimize their operational lifetime. We first present a localized routing algorithm. Then, for a performance evaluation of the localized algorithm, we present a centralized routing algorithm because a centralized approach with global knowledge can closely approach the optimal solution. Unlike many previous energy-aware routing protocols, both of our presented algorithms consider total energy expenditure for guaranteed packet delivery. We use simulation to study their performance under a variety of network conditions. The simulation results show, firstly, that both schemes achieve significant improvement of energy balancing proportional to node density and, secondly, our proposed localized routing scheme achieves a performance comparable to the centralized scheme under dense networks.