A Heuristic Routing Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks in Home Automation

Although numerous routing protocols have been designed for wireless sensor networks, not all are suitable for wireless sensor networks in home automation (WSNHA). In this paper, we evaluate some popular wireless sensor network routing protocols for their suitability to WSNHA. We also propose a greedy-algorithm heuristic routing (GAHR) protocol and an A* algorithm for route finding. We compared the performance of this heuristic routing with the ad-hoc on-demand distance-vector protocol using a simulation. The simulation results showed that this routing protocol dramatically reduced the routing overhead and the average packet delay without impacting reliability, and demonstrated that WSNHA-GAHR adapts automatically to changes in the network topology.