Energy Efficient, Reliable Routing Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

The sensor nodes are typically resource deficient with energy being the most critical of all the resources. The nodes in a WSN are connected typically to a powerful controlling node called the base station. The base station is generally assumed to be connected to a stable power source and is not considered energy deficient, whereas all other nodes are battery powered. So, efficient use of energy resources in sensor nodes could extend the lifetime of the WSNs. The activity of sensing does not require much energy, it is the communication required for the delivery of the sensed data which causes most drainage of a sensors battery. Therefore, the issue of energy saving is considered primarily in transmission and dissemination of data in sensor networks. One of the major cause of shorter lifetime in a multihop network is bottleneck around the base station. In a multihop network, nodes near the base station are responsible for relaying all the data to base station. This leads to faster depletion of their residual energy and ultimately they become bottleneck. Rajani et al. proposed energy-aware asymmetric network based solution to solve the problem. We took the work as our starting point and first gave energy modelling for the above proposed protocol, proving its efficiency theoretically. During the process we found some shortcomings of the protocol and eventually proposed a new asymmetric protocol which is proved to perform better. We provided the real implementation of protocol in TinyOS.