ECAR: an Energy/Channel Aware Routing Protocol For Cooperative Wireless Sensor Networks

The proliferation of low power networks like Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) rose up new challenges. Power conservation and channel quality become the most important parameters. Obviously, hop count based routing protocols are no more adapted to such networks having power limitations and channel problems. Several alternatives were suggested to cope with these constraints. In MAC layer for example, cooperative protocols were designed to enhance the channel use: the neighbor nodes help the source to retransmit its packets. However, if the path proposed by the routing protocol contains poor channels, the cooperative communications will not save all the packets. Therefore, the design of new routing protocol becomes compulsory. In this paper we propose ECAR, a routing protocol that optimizes two objectives at the same time: energy and Channel State Information (CSI). Compared to AODV, ECAR provides considerable enhancements in delivery ratio, end-to-end delay and power consumption.