An energy efficient routing algorithm for wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) is different from the traditional Ad-Hoc networks with its limited size, memory, energy and computation ability, as well as its cheap and densely deployment characteristic. Some special designs must meet these demands. In this paper, we analyze the problems of traditional routing protocols for WSN, and suggest an energy efficient directional routing protocol. In our algorithm, we use election strategy to select the next hop to the sink, and force other candidates to enter sleep state to save energy. These candidates are wakened up after certain duration to attend the next election. The simulation shows that the new algorithm reduces the average dissipated energy by about 50% percent compared with directional flooding when network size is big enough, and the end-to-end delay is also improved significantly. © 2005 IEEE.