Energy Efficient Greedy Approach for Sensor Networks

Abstract

Applications of sensor networks ranging from environmental/military monitoring to industrial asset management. The development of sensor networks was originally motivated by military applications. However, now a days sensor networks are used in many civilian application areas, including environment and habitat monitoring, healthcare applications, home automation, and traffic control (Lewis,2004). It is mentioned above that the main purpose of deployment of sensor networks is to provide feed back and monitoring of environmental variables in areas, which are intractable to humans. The design of energy efficient routing algorithms is an important issue in sensor networks with such deployments. In wireless ad-hoc and sensor networks geographic routing is a key paradigm that is quite commonly adopted for information delivery, where the location information of the nodes are available (either a-priori or through a self-configuring localization mechanism). The implication of geographic routing protocols is efficient in sensor networks for several reasons. Firstly, nodes need to know only the location information of their direct neighbors in order to forward packets and therefore the state stored is minimum. Secondly, since discovery floods and state propagation are not required beyond a single hop hence, such protocols conserve energy and bandwidth. Due to energy constraints in these networks geographic routing in sensor networks has been a challenging issue for researchers. The design of routing strategy may also effect by deployment methodology. Sensors may be deployed randomly or deterministically based on the application in the sensor networks field. These random deployments might result in irregular topologies which in turn affect the routing strategy. Sensors perform both data sending and data routing. Inter-sensor communication is usually short ranged. The nodes in the network cooperate in forwarding other nodes’ packets from source to destination. Hence, certain amount of energy of each node is spent in forwarding the messages of other nodes. Lots of work has been done in this respect but still energy depletion of sensor nodes is a big challenge in sensor networks. The aim of this research is to present such geographic algorithm for sensor networks which will be simple, easy to implement and efficient in terms of energy consumptions. In this research various geographic routing protocols for sensor networks have been studied with their applications to have better understanding of these protocols, This research will explore the paradigm of routing in sensor networks in terms of energy efficiency.