A constrained shortest-path energy-aware routing algorithm for wireless sensor networks

While traditional routing protocols try to minimize the end-to-end delay or maximize the throughput, most energyaware routing protocols for wireless sensor networks try to extend the life time of the network by minimizing the energy consumption sacrificing other performance metrics. In this paper, we introduce a new energy-aware routing protocol that tries to minimize the energy consumption and, at the same time, maintain good end-to-end delay and throughput performance. The new algorithm is based on a constrained shortest-path algorithm. We compare the new algorithm with some traditional routing and energy-aware routing algorithms. The results show that the new algorithm performance is acceptable under all performance metrics and presents a performance balance between the traditional routing algorithms and the energy-aware routing algorithms. The constraint value can be chosen to achieve different performance objectives for different sensor network missions.