Energy-balancing routing algorithm for WirelessHART

Since its release in 2007 by the HART Communication Foundation, WirelessHART plays an important role in industrial process control and monitoring. Many industrial devices are battery-powered and it is hard to replace batteries in harsh environments, hence wireless networks that achieve long network lifetimes are demanded in many industrial settings. The lifetime of a WirelessHART network is negatively affected by the uneven premature energy depletion of individual nodes, so a good network manager should route packages in a way such that the nodes in the network depletes energy at an even pace. This paper presents an energy-balancing routing algorithm based on energy consumption (EBREC). Based on the BFS hierarchical algorithm, the EBREC algorithm first constructs the hierarchical network topology, then collects the energy consumption for each node and generates its primary path and redundant path. The simulation results show that the EBREC algorithm balances the energy consumption of nodes in a WirelessHART network and prolongs the lifetime of the network.