An Improved ETR Protocol with Energy Awareness for Wireless Sensor Networks

Recently, a new routing protocol notes as enhanced tree routing (ETR) has been designated for wireless sensor networks. However, when using the ETR to determine next-hop neighbor, only the reduced hops via them are employed, but the residual energies of one-hop neighbors are not considered. To overcome this flaw of ETR, we propose an improved ETR with energy awareness (ETREA) for sensor network. This protocol takes both the reduced hops and the residual energies into account; it is more comprehensive to determine the optimized neighbors for packet forwarding. It is shown that such an effective decision can be made when there are far more than one-hop neighbors. Simulation results show that the ETREA not only decreases the death number of nodes in network but also achieves the energy balance as well as maximizes the whole network´s lifetime.