Power Aware Routing Algorithms for Wireless Sensor Networks

Recently there have been numerous research results in the area of power efficiency in ad hoc and wireless sensor networks. This paper discusses the effect of power efficient routing algorithms on the lifetime of multihop wireless sensor networks (WSNs). The WSNs considered are special cases of mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs); in particular, we assume that all data and control traffic in the WSN is flowing between the sensor nodes and the base station. This assumption results in a considerably simpler problem and solution than for the more general MANETs. We calculate analytically lifetime bounds of the WSN under specific routing algorithms. The main result of the paper is that, for WSNs, the choice of the routing algorithm has almost no consequence to the lifetime of the network. This result, as well as being obviously useful, is somewhat surprising since this is not true of general MANETs.