Energy Efficient Switch-Based Packet Forwarding for Low Duty-Cycle Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

This letter studies the problem of energy efficient routing in multihop wireless sensor networks (WSNs) with low duty cycle, where a switch-based forwarding scheme is employed. We consider the unreliable end-to-end packet transmissions and propose a routing metric, expected efficient energy consumption (EEEC), to reflect the energy consumption incurred in the routing process. We give an analytic model of the proposed metric and devise distributed algorithms which can find an EEEC-optimal relay sequence for the forwarders under a delivery ratio constraint. Simulation results illustrate the benefit of our proposed metric and algorithms over the state-of-the art.