Improving energy efficiency for ARPEES routing protocol in wireless sensor networks

Networking together hundreds or thousands of cheap microsensor nodes allows users to accurately monitor a remote environment. These wireless sensor networks (WSN) require robust but simple, scalable, energy efficient and also self configurable routing algorithms. To overcome all these challenges, the ARPEES protocol (ARPEES-adaptive routing protocol with energy efficiency and event clustering for wireless sensor networks) is proposed in [1]. The main design features of the proposed method are: energy efficiency, dynamic event clustering and multi-hop relay considering the trade-off relationship between the residual energy of relay nodes and distance from the relay node to the base station (BS). More concretely, energy and distance are considered as main parameters for selecting optimal path from cluster head (CH) to the BS. In this paper, we propose a new scheme (named OPEAS-Optimal Path and Energy Aware Sensor routing protocol) that uses different parameters and reduces the number of broadcasting messages during the relay node selection phase. These two main design features of OPEAS lead to the reduction of energy consumption of the entire network compared to ARPEES and other algorithms of the same category. Our simulation results shows that the new protocol OPEAS achieves better energy consumption, better lifetime, better packet loss rate than ARPEES and other similar routing protocols.