An average velocity-based routing protocol with low end-to-end delay for wireless sensor networks

To reduce energy consumption, in most MAC protocols for wireless sensor networks, listen-sleep cycles are adopted. However, even though it is a good solution for energy efficiency, it may introduce a large end-to-end delay due to sleep delay, since a node with a packet to transmit should wait until the next-hop node of the packet awakes. To resolve this issue, in this paper, we propose the average velocity-based routing (AVR) protocol for wireless sensor networks that aims at reducing the end-to-end delay. The AVR protocol is a kind of a geographic routing protocol that considers both location of a node and waiting time of a packet at the MAC layer. When a node can use information of n-hop away neighbor nodes, it calculates the n-hop average velocity for each of its one-hop neighbor nodes and forwards a packet to the neighbor node that has the highest n-hop average velocity. Simulation results show that as the knowledge range, n, increases, the average end-to-end delay decreases.