Study of power-aware routing protocal in wireless sensor networks

A wireless sensor network(WSN) is usually deployed in a harsh physical environments to gather data that can be delivered to the remotely located base station. Sensor nodes have irreplaceable energy source, limited computational capability and limited memory. Since wireless communications consume significant amounts of battery power, sensor nodes should spend as little energy as possible receiving and transmitting data. It is a challenge to maximize the use of energy of these sensor nodes to extend the network lifetime. Development of the efficient power aware protocol is the need of WSN. After analyzing the power control mechanisms and energy model in WSN, some power aware routing protocal proposed for WSN are compared. This paper presents several of the popular power-aware routing protocal that increases the network lifetime. Simulation results by NS2 show that the proposed power-aware routing protocol has a higher performance than other routing protocols in the network lifetime.