An Energy-Efficient Region Source Routing Protocol for Lifetime Maximization in WSN

As the sensor layer of Internet of Things (IOT), enormous amount of sensor nodes are densely deployed in a hostile environment to monitor and sense the changes in the physical space. Since sensor nodes are driven with limited power batteries, it is very difficult and expensive for wireless sensor networks (WSNs) to extend network lifetime. In order to achieve reliable data transmission in WSNs, energy efficient routing protocol is a crucial issue in extending the network lifetime of a network. However, traditional routing protocols usually propagate throughout the whole network to discover a reliable route or employ some cluster heads to undertake data transmission for other nodes, which both require large amount energy consumption. In this paper, to maximize the network lifetime of the WSN, we propose a novel energy efficient region source routing protocol (referred to ER-SR). In ER-SR, a distributed energy region algorithm is proposed to select the nodes with high residual energy in the network as source routing node dynamically. Then, the source routing nodes calculate the optimal source routing path for each common node, which enables partial nodes to participate in the routing process and balances the energy consumption of sensor nodes. Furthermore, to minimize the energy consumption of data transmission, we propose an effective distance-based ant colony optimization algorithm to search the global optimal transmission path for each node. Simulation results demonstrate that ER-SR exhibits higher energy efficiency, and has moderate performance improvements on network lifetime, packet delivery ratio, and delivery delay, compared with other routing protocols in WSNs.