Designing energy efficient routing scheme with delay constraint forwireless sensor networks

In this paper, we consider energy efficient routing with delay constraint in wireless sensor networks. Our study is motivated by the following observation. Relaying between nodes seems to consume less transmission power than communication with large distances. However, this well-known issue is not always true when there is an end-to-end delay constraint. Since relaying increases the hop count, transmission rate for each hop has to be raised to satisfy the latency demand. Additional energy cost for raising transmission rate will counteract the benefit from relaying. Therefore, hop count and transmission rate should be carefully set to conserve energy. We propose a Delay-constrained Energy Efficient Routing (DEER) scheme, which adaptively adjust hop count and transmission rate according to delay constraint. It is demonstrated by simulation that DEER outperforms traditional routing schemes.