Energy-aware geographic routing protocol with sleep scheduling for wireless multimedia sensor networks

In Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks, the strict quality-of-service requirements mandate discovering and routing via shortest paths. The intensity of the multimedia traffic causes relay nodes energy to deplete relatively fast. This often leads to breaking the routing path and causing the transmission to halt until a new path is discovered. Keeping the inactive relay nodes awake all the time causes their energy to deplete uselessly and decreases the chance of discovering alternative paths. This paper introduces a geographic routing protocol called (EA-TPGF-SS) with energy-awareness, simple synchronized sleep scheduling mechanism, and feedback capability on the residual energy of the relay nodes. The performance evaluation and comparative analysis show that the proposed approach can significantly improve the network lifetime, end-to-end delay, number of delivered packets, and delivered packets per Joule; compared to existing similar approaches, however it has a slight decrease in the overall throughput.