Transmission channel sensitive multi-metric routing for Wireless Sensor Networks

Multi-metric hop cost model is an efficient way to improve the performance of routing protocols and provide more flexibility. Depending on the network objectives and characteristics, various parameters like hop count, energy consumption, and relay load affect the overall hop and path cost. In this paper, after presentation of the situations which degrades the routing performance in WSNs, we propose a more realistic hop cost model including transmission loss, and energy storage and relay traffic of the nodes. Two methods to achieve metrics and apply the new model to the DV-based routing protocols are then presented. Numerical analyses approve the effectiveness of the new hop cost model to regulate the energy storage in the network and improve the energy efficiency by selection of the paths which have better quality in terms of transmission channel and node state. The cost of these improvements is an increase in the length of the path as the best path is not necessarily the shortest one. It is also shown that the effectiveness of the new model is controllable as the overall cost is a weighted summation of the old and new path cost metric.