Energy-Efficient Geographic Routing in Environmentally Powered Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Current and potential applications of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) include military sensing, physical security, traffic surveillance, and environment monitoring, etc. Due to the fact that WSNs are composed of a large number of low-cost but energy constrained nodes, scalable and energy-efficient routing protocols are requisite for the WSN applications. In this paper, we study energy-efficient geographic routing protocols in environmentally powered WSNs, where the sensor nodes are capable of extracting energy from the environment. We propose a protocol, geographic energy-aware blacklisting routing with energy supply (GEBRES), which makes routing decision locally by jointly taking into account multiple factors-the realistic wireless channel condition, packets advancement to the destination, the energy availability on the node with environmental energy supply. Simulation results show that GEBRES is more energy efficient than the corresponding residual energy based protocols without considering the property of the energy changing (including recharging and consuming) rate. In particular, given the same energy and traffic models, GEBRES maintains higher minimum residual energy on nodes and achieves better load balancing in terms of having a smaller standard deviation of residual energy among nodes. GEBRES exhibits a little degradation on end-to-end delay, but does not compromise the end-to-end throughput performance