REAR: Reliable Energy Aware Routing Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

In wireless sensor networks, micro sensor nodes dispersed in real environmental field have a constraint energy capacity, so energy-efficient mechanism for wireless communication on each sensor node is so crucial. Specially, the jobs sending and processing sensing data information from on sensor node to the others are more majority parts than merely sensing some events. Thus, energy-efficient routing protocol in wireless sensor networks is necessary for increasing the network lifetime and is also influenced by many challenging factors in terms of energy, processing, and storage capacities. In this paper, we designed and implemented a reliable energy aware routing (REAR) protocol for wireless sensor networks and evaluated the performance of REAR by comparing with existing routing protocols. REAR considers residual energy capacity of each sensor node in establishing routing paths and supports multi-path routing protocol for reliable data transmission. Furthermore, REAR allows each sensor node to confirm success of data transmission to other sensor nodes by supporting the DATA-ACK oriented packet transmission. Finally, the performance evaluation results show that REAR provides energy-efficiency and reliability related to wireless communication in wireless sensor networks.