A New Energy-Aware Routing Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

The limited battery power characteristic limits the utilization time of wireless devices and networks. Thus, an energy-efficient routing protocol is critical to the performance of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), especially to the lifetime of network. Some routing protocols have been proposed in previous work which mainly concentrated on the efficient use of energy. This paper proposes a novel energy-efficient protocol, called Route Maintenance based-on Energy Threshold (RMET), which achieves the goal of maximum network lifetime by evenly distributing the energy expenditure among nodes. And at the same time, Route Request Delay Transmit (RRDT) is also proposed to avoid selecting the node with lower residual battery power than the threshold value. The proposed protocol is implemented in the ns-2 simulator and the simulation results show that the proposed protocol can extend the lifetime of nodes and enhance the efficiencies of the entire network.