Energy-efficient Traffic-aware Multihop Routing for Wireless Sensor Networks

Since link failures and packet losses are inevitable, ad hoc wireless sensor networks may tolerate a certain level of reliability without significantly affecting packets delivery performance and data aggregation accuracy in favor of efficient energy consumption. An efficient hybrid approach is to make trade-offs between energy, reliability, cost, and agility while improving packet delivery, maintaining low packet error ratio, minimizing unnecessary control packets transmissions, and adaptively reducing control traffic in favor of high success reception ratios of representative data packets. Based on this approach, the proposed routing scheme achieves moderate energy consumption and high packet delivery ratio even though the link failure rate is high. The performance of our proposed routing scheme is experimentally investigated using a testbed of TelosB motes in addition to ns2 simulations. It is shown to be more robust and energy efficient than the current TinyOS2.x collection layer. Our results show that our scheme maintains higher than 95% connectivity in interference-prone medium while achieving an average of over 35% energy savings. Our routing scheme is rigorously tested in outdoor testbed and is currently being investigated using large-scale simulations.