An energy-aware QoS routing protocol for wireless sensor networks

Recent advances in wireless sensor networks have led to many new routing protocols specifically designed for sensor networks. Almost all of these routing protocols considered energy efficiency as the ultimate objective in order to maximize the whole network lifetime. However, the introduction of video and imaging sensors has posed additional challenges. Transmission of video and imaging data requires both energy and QoS aware routing in order to ensure efficient usage of the sensors and effective access to the gathered measurements. In this paper, we propose an energy-aware QoS routing protocol, which can also run efficiently with best-effort traffic. The protocol finds a least-cost, delay-constrained path for real-time data in terms of link cost that captures nodes´ energy reserve, transmission energy, error rate and other communication parameters. Moreover, throughput for non-real-time data is maximized by adjusting the service rate for both real-time and non-realtime data at sensor nodes. Simulation results have demonstrated the effectiveness of our approach.