Localized power-aware routing with an energy-efficient pipelined wakeup schedule for wireless sensor networks

Depending on the evolutions in electronics, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have been very popular in many areas of human life such as health, industry, and military. This popularity has drawn the attention of many researchers toward WSNs. WSNs are especially favorable in conditions in which it is physically difficult and dangerous for human beings to gather information. Therefore, the lifetime of those networks must be as long as possible, since it would also be infeasible to replace the energy-depleted sensors with new ones, as they may be deployed in such geographical areas that are difficult and dangerous for human beings to enter. In this paper, we present a localized energy-aware routing method, LEERA-MS, and an alternative LEERA-MS-TH method, used in cooperation with an energy-efficient sleep-wakeup schedule, which is included with the pipelining mechanism that we previously proposed. Employing multiple sinks improves performance by providing a fair distribution of the load. Simulation results show that this routing method, applied on a multiple sink topology and when employed together with the pipelined sleep-wakeup schedule, provides 40% longer lifetime for WSNs.