An Energy-Saving Routing Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks consist of large number of sensor nodes which have a constraint energy capacity, so energy-efficient mechanism is important. Specially, sending packets from the source node to the destination node is the more majority part than merely sensing some events. Thus, energy-saving routing protocol in wireless sensor networks is necessary for increasing the network lifetime. Less energy consumption can be achieved by reducing the node transmission radius. In this paper, we present a transmission radius self-adjust energy-saving routing protocol (RSES) for wireless sensor networks. Using RSES, node reduces its max transmission radius only to reach the farthest neighbor before it sends the first packet. The on-demand route discovery process is initiated whenever a source sensor node needs to communicate with another node for which it has no routing information in its route table, and energy-saving strategy has been designed for the route discovery. When remnant energy reaches a certain threshold, node reduces its transmission radius again in order to achieve less energy consumption under the premise of the certain coverage ratio. Simulation results demonstrate that RSES can prolong the network lifetime and has a balanced network load and routing traffic.