Localized power-aware routing in linear wireless sensor networks

Energy-efficency is a key concern when designing protocols for wireless sensor networks (WSN). This is of particular importance in commercial applications where demonstrable return on investment is a crucial factor. One such commercial application that motivated this work is telemetry and control for freight railroad trains. Since a railroad train has a global linear structure by nature, we consider in this paper linear WSNs as sensor networks having, roughly, a linear topology. Aiming at such networks, we introduce two routing schemes that efficiently utilize energy: Minimum Energy Relay Routing (MERR) and Adaptive MERR (AMERR). We derive a theoretical lower bound on the optimal power consumption of routing in a linear WSN, where we assume a Poisson model for the distribution of nodes along a linear path. We evaluate the efficiency of our protocols with respect to the theoretical optimal lower bound and with respect to other well-known protocols. AMERR achieves optimal performance fo...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: PERVASIVE
• Authors: Marco Zimmerling, Waltenegus Dargie, Johnathan M. Reason
• Keywords: Applied Computing, Linear, Linear Wsn, PERVASIVE 2008, Wireless Sensor Network