Joint routing and transmission power control for Collection Tree Protocol in WSN

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have strict energy consumption requirements. Moreover, the complexity constraints of the nodes and the wireless dynamics must be considered in real life implementations. CTP (Collection Tree Protocol) is a state-of-the-art routing protocol that considers the main issues that arise in practical WSN applications. Nowadays, commercial wireless sensors can adjust their transmission power to reduce the energy consumption and the collision probability of the network. Since nodes in CTP transmit at a predefined power, the reliability and the lifetime of the network may be reduced. To solve this, this paper proposes an alternative routing metric for CTP, referred to as MaxPDR, that includes a transmission power control in the routing process. With this strategy, the incompatibility issues and the additional signaling that may arise with the combination of individual techniques are avoided. MaxPDR has been implemented in commercial motes to evaluate its performance and compare it with the routing metrics used by the original CTP and ZigBee.