Scalable energy-efficient location aided routing (SELAR) protocol for wireless sensor networks

Large-scale wireless sensor networks consist of thousands of tiny and low cost nodes with very limited energy, computing power and communication capabilities. They have a myriad of possible applications. They can be used in hazardous and hostile environments to sense for deadly gases and high temperatures, in personal area networks to monitor vital signs, in military and civilian environments for intrusion detection and tracking, emergency operations, etc. In large scale wireless sensor networks the protocols need to be scalable and energy-efficient. Further, new strategies are needed to address the well-known energy depletion problem that nodes close to the sink node face. In this thesis the Scalable Energy-efficient Location-Aided Routing (SELAR) protocol for wireless sensor networks is proposed to solve the above mentioned problems. In SELAR, nodes use location and energy information of the neighboring nodes to perform the routing function. Further, the sink node is moved during the network operation to increase the network lifetime. By means of simulations, the SELAR protocol is evaluated and compared with two very well-known protocols LEACH (Low-Energy Adaptive-Clustering Hierarchy) and MTE (Minimum Transmission Energy). The results indicate that in realistic senarios, SELAR delivers upto 12 times more and upto 1.4 times more data packets to the base station than LEACH and MTE respectively. It was also seen from the results that for realistic scenarios, SELAR with moving base station has upto 5 times and upto 27 times more lifetime duration compared to MTE and LEACH respectively.