EBRP: energy band based routing protocol for wireless sensor networks

Distributed sensor networks are large-scale, autonomous resource constrained systems used for gathering data in an intelligent manner. We study the concept of energy fairness in routing in sensor networks so as to increase the network lifetime. Our model aims to construct a nearly stateless routing protocol, which can be used to route data based on the residual energy of the nodes. This algorithm divides the network into different energy bands and then constructs routing paths. This type of architecture is novel and more suitable to wireless sensor networks that generate a lot of traffic as it achieves nearly uniform load distribution across all the nodes. This model has the advantage of eliminating the bottlenecks in the network, because the nodes will be expending their energies at a constant measured rate. This mechanism has another advantage wherein the paths need not be computed every time the data is sent. Simulations show that our model achieves fairness and load balancing across the network and increases the lifetime considerably.