Energy efficient routing for wireless sensor networks in urban environments

The interconnection of mobile devices in urban environments such as shopping malls can open up a lot of vistas for collaboration and content-based services. This will require setting up of a network in an urban environment which not only provides the necessary services to the user, but also ensures that the network is energy efficient. In this paper, we propose an energy efficient dynamic routing protocol for heterogeneous wireless sensor networks in urban environments. A decision is made by every node based on various parameters like longevity, distance and battery power that measure the link quality to decide the next hop node in the route. This ensures that the total load is distributed evenly while conserving the energy of the battery-constrained nodes and minimizing the number of dead nodes in the network and improving the network lifetime. The paper discusses the results obtained for the proposed protocol in comparison with an energy efficient protocol MMBCR and a widely accepted protocol DSR. The performance of the proposed protocol was analyzed using simulation analysis and observed to be better than these of both competing protocols.