ZEEP: Zone based energy efficient routing protocol for mobile sensor networks

Abstract

Demand for wireless communication has greatly increased the use of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). However, with increase in device and user mobility, a lot of research focus in these networks is on predicting the random movement of these nodes and addressing the issue of finding an alternate route to a destination node in case of path breaks or route failure. Many routing protocols have been proposed in past, but since power consumption and computation in a WSN are major constraints, therefore the protocols designed for such networks should aim at efficient management of sensing node's energy and computational capabilities in presence of mobility. Hence in this paper, we propose a new energy efficient algorithm called as ZEEP (Zone based Energy Efficient routing Protocol). Our proposed protocol ZEEP is designed for both stationary and mobile nodes and requires no excess mechanisms for path discovery, route maintenance or maintaining large routing tables. It uses the concept of dynamic forwarding and therefore saves nodes from excessive computations. The extensive simulations performed over ZEEP prove that ZEEP gives high packet delivery ratio, with less energy consumption by the network, thereby increasing the network lifetime when compared to the most famous On Demand Distance Vector routing (AODV) protocol. The simulations are performed on ns2.