Slot Management based Energy Aware routing (SMEAR) for wireless sensor networks

ZigBee is the emerging industrial standard for Ad hoc networks based on the IEEE 802.15.4 physical and MAC layers standard. It was originally specified for low data rate, low power consumption and low cost wireless personal area networks (WPANs). ZigBee is expected to be used in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) for industrial sensing and control applications. Handling high data rate applications, such as video surveillance in WPANs is a real challenge. To decrease energy consumption of the node in a ZigBee network, in this paper, time management routing, where multiple paths are used in various time slot to transfer data between a source and the sink. This paper presents an integrated MAC and routing protocol called Slot Management based Energy Aware routing (SMEAR) for time-sensitive wireless sensor network (WSN) applications. SMEAR is a TDMA-based protocol designed to provide deterministic delay guarantee in an energy-efficient manner. The slots for the path of nodes are carefully computed so that data is transported from the source toward the sink whereas the nodes could sleep at other times to conserve energy. This paper has simulated SMEAR using ns2 simulator and results are compared with those of without SMEAR. Simulation results show that the packet reception ratio, energy consumption and number of packets received at the sink are much better in a network using SMEAR than that using without SMEAR.