Energy aware efficient geographic routing in lossy wireless sensor networks with environmental energy supply

Wireless sensor networks are characterized by multihop wireless lossy links and resource constrained nodes. Energy efficiency is a major concern in such networks. In this paper, we study Geographic Routing with Environmental Energy Supply (GREES) and propose two protocols, GREES-L and GREES-M, which combine geographic routing and energy efficient routing techniques and take into account the realistic lossy wireless channel condition and the renewal capability of environmental energy supply when making routing decisions. Simulation results show that GREESs are more energy efficient than the corresponding residual energy based protocols and geographic routing protocols without energy awareness. GREESs can maintain higher mean residual energy on nodes, and achieve better load balancing in terms of having smaller standard deviation of residual energy on nodes. Both GREES-L and GREES-M exhibit graceful degradation on end-to-end delay, but do not compromise the end-to-end throughput performance.