Designing an Application-Aware Routing Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Routing protocols that can facilitate application- specific service guarantee in wireless sensor networks (WSN) constitute one of the key design objectives of current WSN research. Since energy-efficient routing protocols in literature do not offer a complete framework for service differentiation, a newer approach is warranted. Formulating such routing approach requires the adoption of different cost metrics that can parameterize the application-specific requirements. To this effect, this paper proposes an application-aware routing protocol (AARP) that considers battery power, data transaction reliability and end-to-end delay for service differentiation. Two mathematical models namely analytical hierarchical process (AHP) and grey relational analysis (GRA) are incorporated for intermediate node selection (ranking and subsequent selection based on local weight calculation) for data transaction purposes. As demonstrated by the simulation results, the proposed routing approach offers service configurability across a range of applications.