An Energy Aware Routing Protocol with Sleep Scheduling for WSN

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) consist of a large number of small and low cost sensor nodes powered by small batteries and equipped with various sensing devices. Usually, for many applications, once a WSN is deployed, probably in an inhospitable terrain, it is expected to gather the required data for quite some time, say for years. Since each sensor node has limited energy, these nodes are usually put to sleep to conserve energy, and this helps to prolong the net work lifetime. There are two major approaches to sleep scheduling of sensor nodes, viz. (i) random (ii) synchronized. Any sleep scheduling scheme has to ensure that data can always be routed from source to sink. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for sleep scheduling of sensor nodes using a tree and an energy aware routing protocol which is integrated with the proposed sleep scheduling scheme. The tree is rooted at the sink node. The internal nodes of the tree remain awake and the leaf nodes are made to sleep. This provides an assured path from any node to the sink node. The tree is periodically reconstructed considering the remaining energy of each node with a view to balance energy consumption of nodes, and removes any failed nodes from the tree. The proposed approach also considerably reduces average energy consumption rate of each node as we are able to put more number of nodes to sleep in comparison to other approaches. Additional fault-tolerance is provided by keeping two paths from each node towards the sink. The most important issue that must be solved in designing a data gathering algorithm for wireless sensor networks (WSNS) is how to save sensor node energy while meeting the needs of applications/users. In this paper, we propose a novel energy-aware routing protocol (EAP) for a long-lived sensor network. EAP achieves a good performance in terms of lifetime by minimizing energy consumption for in-network communications and balancing the energy load among all the nodes. EAP introduces a new clustering parameter for cluster head election, which can better handle the heterogeneous energy capacities. Furthermore, it also introduces a simple but efficient approach, namely, intra cluster coverage to cope with the area coverage problem.