E3TX: an energy-efficient expected transmission count routing decision strategy for wireless sensor networks

Abstract

The routing protocol is one of the most important aspects of the wireless sensor network, determining network connectivity, delay, energy balancing, reliability and other factors. Furthermore, a minimum hop-count does not mean minimum delay and energy consumption. To overcome the routing protocol's shortcomings, we proposed an energy-efficient expected transmission count routing decision strategy (E3TX) for wireless sensor networks. E3TX makes use of two physical parameters, received signal strength indicator (RSSI) and battery voltage, to obtain the final decision via our proposed decision strategy. In our strategy, the received signal strength indicator is used to predict the future packet reception rate (PRR), and the battery voltage is used to estimate the residual energy of network nodes to balance their load. In order to estimate the packet reception rate via the received signal strength indicator with greater accuracy, we performed multiple experiments to build the relationship model between RSSI and PRR. In this article, we use NS-2.35 to evaluate and compare the performance of E3TX with AODV, AOMDV and BIETX. Our simulation results show that our proposed E3TX performs well when compared to the previous studies, not only in terms of energy consumption, but also in reliable data transmission and end-to-end delay.