A greedy minimum energy consumption forwarding protocol for wireless sensor networks

Energy consumption is a vital resource to be controlled to extend the longevity of a wireless sensor network. In a multihop routing, lifetime as well as throughput of the network could be increased by selecting the forwarding node intelligently. The existing energy-aware routing protocols either do not jointly consider the network performance and energy saving, or they are not distributed. In this paper, we propose an efficient greedy forwarding protocol, called minimum energy consumption forwarding, which selects a forwarding node on the basis of minimum transmit and receive energy consumption per successful packet transmission per unit Euclidean distance progress toward the destination, in a distributed fashion. In the proposed algorithm, at each hop the forwarding decision can be either taken by the transmitter at each forwarding node or the best forwarder can be elected by some kind of election contention mechanism. Through network simulations we have shown that the proposed energy consumption minimizing distributed forwarding strategy outperforms the greedy geographic forwarding algorithm in terms of increasing the network lifetime and end-to-end throughput. The proposed algorithm can be easily retrofitted in the already developed network capable wireless sensor nodes.