SHORT: Shortest Hop Routing Tree for Wireless Sensor Networks

For time-sensitive applications requiring frequent data collections from a remote wireless sensor network, it is a challenging task to design an efficient routing scheme that can minimize delay and also offer good performance in energy efficiency, network lifetime and throughput. In this paper, we propose a new routing scheme, called Shortest Hop Routing Tree (SHORT), to achieve those design objectives through effectively generating simultaneous communication pairs and identifying the shortest hop (closest neighbor) for packet relay. Compared with the existing popular schemes such as PEGASIS, BINARY and PEDAP-PA, SHORT offers the best "energy x delay" performance and has the capability to achieve a very good balance among different performance metrics.