An energy-efficient routing protocol for wireless sensor networks with battery level uncertainty

A wireless microsensor network consists of a large number of low-cost nodes communicating with a base station. The nodes have limited energy and short transmission ranges. By employing estimates of the remaining battery energy in routing, the use of radios nearing energy exhaustion can be discouraged. Knowledge of the rate at which a node is consuming its energy provides additional useful information. This paper investigates novel routing metrics that incorporate both kinds of information to improve network performance. Also, in practice, there may be some error in a node's estimate of its battery level. The metrics are designed to explicitly account for uncertainty in remaining energy. Numerical results using several statistical models for this uncertainty show that the proposed metrics outperform a variety of alternatives.