Energy-Efficient Routing Techniques for Wireless Sensors Networks

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs), which normally consist of hundreds or thousands of sensor nodes each capable of sensing, processing, and transmitting environmental information, are deployed to monitor certain physical phenomena or to detect and track certain objects in an area of interests. The sensor nodes in WSN transmit data depending on local information and parameters such as signal strength, power consumption, location of data collection and accretion. Only reachable nodes are able to communicate with each other directly to collect and transmit data. The motes have limited energy resources along with constraints on its computational and storage capabilities. Thus, innovative techniques that eliminate energy inefficiencies that would shorten the lifetime of the network are highly required. Such constraints combined with a typical deployment of large number of sensor nodes pose many challenges to the design and management of WSNs and necessitate energy-awareness at all layers of the networking protocol stack. In this chapter, we present a survey of the state-of-the-art routing techniques in WSNs that take into consideration the energy issue.