Study on an Energy-aware Routing Algorithm for Agriculture WSN

As precision farming requires real-time, accurate and sustainable monitoring of the biotope of the field, energy consumption and network delay constitute the major factors affecting the performance of ZigBee-based Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) applied in agricultural production. Based on the AODVjr algorithm, this paper presents a new algorithm, namely NS-AODVjr. Featuring emphasis on energy control and dynamic routing, as well as balance between energy consumption and shortest path routing, this algorithm realizes maximum service time of the WSN while ensuring timely and effective transmission of the data in the monitoring process. After a simulation experiment with the Network Simulator tool, results show that, compared to the original algorithm, although the packet delivery rate and network delay witness no improvement, the new algorithm not only significantly reduces the device energy consumption, but also effectively expand the service time of the network.