An energy-aware grid-based routing scheme for wireless sensor networks

Abstract

As an important field of emerging technology, wireless sensor networks (WSN) offer many new possibilities for applications such as target tracking and environmental surveillance by allowing the observer to move around freely. However, disseminating sensing data to the mobile observer raises significant design challenges for the routing scheme. In addition, WSN often operate under certain energy constraints, and therefore reducing energy dissipation in order to prolong the lifetime of the WSN is another challenge that must be faced. Most proposed routing protocols focus on achieving effective data dissemination and energy efficiency at the same time as working to satisfy the requirements of the mobile observer. However, almost all of these methods use frequent rerouting as a way of handling the mobility issue. Such rerouting increases both overheads and energy consumption, resulting in a trade-off between the need for rerouting to optimize network operations and that of maximizing network lifetime. This paper presents the Energy-aware Grid-based Routing Scheme (EAGER) for WSN with mobile observers, which is an approach that seeks to save more energy in the context of dynamic topology. In this paper, EAGER is compared to other proposed grid-based schemes by using extensive simulations. These simulations clearly show that EAGER outperforms other grid-based schemes in terms of both energy efficiency and routing performance.