EDR: efficient data routing in wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Routing in sensor networks is very challenging compared to contemporary communication and wireless ad–hoc networks. This is attributed to several characteristics that distinguish them from such networks. Transmitting data from every sensor node within the deployment region might result in significant and unnecessary redundancy in data and incur avoidable energy and traffic expenditure; thus, a routing protocol which is able to select a set of sensor nodes and utilise data aggregation during the relaying of data is of great importance. Furthermore, timely delivery of data is required in many applications of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), such as real–time target tracking in battle environments, emergent event triggering in monitoring applications impose the need of efficient routing protocol. In this paper, we propose a data routing scheme which ensures increased network lifetime by exploiting energy efficiently, supporting reliability, fast delivery of delay–sensitive data and achieving low–cost sensor design. Simulation results demonstrate that, the proposed routing scheme outperforms related existing approaches in terms of all the evaluation metrics such as packet delivery ratio, energy efficiency and timely delivery of data.