An Eficient Energy Aware Routing Protocol for Real Time Trafics in Wireless Sensor Networks 735 An Eficient Energy Aware Routing Protocol for Real Time Trafics in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) have recently been extensively deployed and researched. They are composed of a high number of small and simple nodes where most of them have to function as a router in an ad hoc manner. Because of limited energy sources in sensor network node, routing protocols should save the energy as much as possible. Energy consumption has a direct influence on network lifetime. From the Quality of Service (QoS) point of view, in many applications such as real time one, it is necessary to consider application QoS requirements. In this paper we propose an energy aware routing protocol for real time traffics in wireless sensor networks. The proposed protocol considers both energy and delay metrics to find an optimal path with minimum energy consumption and minimum end to end delay. Simulation results show that the proposed protocol is successful in low energy consumption and satisfying low end to end delay which makes it suitable for real time applications. In the recent years, many researches have been conducted on wireless sensor networks. A wireless sensor network consists of sensor nodes that communicate with each other using wireless links. Wireless sensor networks contain hundreds or thousands of sensor nodes that can both send and forward data (Akyldiz et al., 2002), ( Tubaishat & Madria, 2003) . The WSNs are used to monitor physical or environmental conditions, such as temperature, sound, vibration, pressure, motion or pollutants, at different locations. Each node in WSNs consists of different parts including: sensors, processor unit (usually a small microcontroller), energy source (usually a battery) and communication unit. The communication part of a sensor node uses wireless communication devices, to be able to send and forward data using a wireless link. During past few years, WSNs have found many different applications. Typical applications of WSNs include monitoring, tracking, and controlling. Some of the specific applications of WSNs are: habitat monitoring, object tracking, nuclear reactor controlling, fire detection and traffic monitoring. Small sensor nodes could also be used for medical applications (Mann, 1997), e.g., for the surveillance of elderly people. In this application, sensor devices monitor vital function and report them to the family doctor or directly to the ambulance in case of an 33