Designing Energy-Aware Adaptive Routing for Wireless Sensor Networks

Many energy-aware routing protocols take into account the residual battery power in sensor nodes or/and the energy required for transmission along the path. In the deployment of an environmental sensor network, we observed that applications may also impose requirements on routing, thus placing higher demands on protocol design. We demonstrated our approach to this issue through FloodNet, a flood warning system, which uses a predictor model developed by environmental experts to make flood predictions based on readings of water level collected by a set of sensor nodes. Because the model influences the node reporting frequency, we proposed the FloodNet adaptive routing (FAR) which transmits data across nodes with ample en- ergy and light reporting tasks whilst conserving energy for others low on battery power and heavily required by the monitoring task. As a reactive protocol, FAR is robust to topology changes due to moving obstacles and transient node failure. We evaluate the FAR performance through simulation, the result of which corresponds with its anticipated behavior and improvements.