A Probabilistic Energy-Efficient Routing (PEER) Scheme for Ad-hoc Sensor Networks

Wireless ad-hoc sensor networks consist of small nodes with sensing, computing, and communicating capabilities. Energy deficiency is a key problem of these kinds of networks. Many routing, power management, and data dissemination protocols have been specifically designed for them where energy awareness is a chief design issue. This paper proposes a new probabilistic agent-based energy efficient routing strategy (PEER). In contrast to the earlier work that focus on energy-aware routing, PEER takes into account both total cost and individual residual energy of the whole path statistically (path-based) when selecting the next hop, i.e. each intermediate node chooses its next hop node based on the statistical path information from that node to the sink. We show through analysis and simulations that PEER can prolong the network survivability, shorten the average packet delay, and hence outperform all the existing routing schemes. Moreover, we conjecture that the coefficient rho in PEER may be intelligently adjusted to fit the situation of the volatile networks, thus we make further investigation into it and achieve the intending results