A distributed energy efficient and energy balanced routing algorithm for wireless sensor networks

The main function of any wireless sensor network (WSN) is to route sensed data to the remote base station. However, the major bottleneck for such operation is the limited and irreplaceable power source of the sensor nodes. In order to minimize the energy consumption in the process of data routing, data packets are generally forwarded through a path that consumes minimum energy, which leads to uneven energy consumption of the sensor nodes and as a result the network is partitioned. Therefore, a routing algorithm should consider not only energy consumption of the sensor nodes but also their energy balancing. In this paper, we present a distributed routing algorithm which takes care both of these issues. Moreover, the algorithm is shown to be fault tolerant. We use energy density of the sensor nodes to balance the energy consumption and the distance between the nodes to conserve energy. Experiments are performed in diverse number of network scenarios and the results show that the proposed work is superior to the existing routing algorithms.