Energy-aware routing for e-health wireless sensor networks

Wireless monitoring devices are an ideal option for e-health solutions because of their usage convenience. One of the most important challenges in the design of a wireless sensor network is to extend the lifetime of the monitoring devices. The solution presented in this paper is focused on providing a dynamic routing strategy for wireless sensor networks used in e-health systems, with the main objective of increasing network lifetime. We use a common network model and we propose a novel energy aware routing algorithm that discovers and selects the best route between a source and the sink node in a distributed fashion. We selected the Weighted Product Model (WPM) as the mechanism used to estimate the cost of the routes. The energy consumption for the proposed algorithm is evaluated with a target platform (e.g. mote - sensor node).