Inductive routing based on energy and delay metrics in wireless sensor networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) represent actually one of the challenging type of Delay-tolerant networks due their sparse connectivity and hard coverage. In addition, the emergence of applications with different types of traffic in these networks, assurance of Quality of Service (QoS) becomes more and more important. In recent years, lot of research has been conducted to improve the QoS in WSN. In this article, we introduce a Quality of Service (QoS) routing algorithm based on dynamic state-dependent policies. The proposed algorithm uses a bio-inspired approach based on trial/error paradigm to optimize two QoS different criteria: Energy and end-to-end delay. Our proposal, called EDEAR "Energy and Delay Efficient Adaptive Routing", is based on explorer agent who is responsible for collecting information in terms of energy and delay by using continuous learning parameters on the network and update routing maintained at each node of the network. The exploration of routes has been optimized by proposing a new algorithm based on multipoint relay for energy consumption, thus reducing the overhead generated by the packets exploration. Numerical results obtained with NS simulator for different levels of traffic's load and mobility show that EDEAR gives better performances compared to traditional approaches.