An Adaptive Energy Efficient Reliable Routing Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

A reliable routing protocol for wireless sensor networks (WSN) should be capable of adjusting to constantly varying network conditions while conserving maximum power. Existing Routing protocols provide reliability at the cost of high energy consumption. In this paper, we propose to develop an Adaptive Energy Efficient Reliable Routing Protocol (AEERRP) with the aim of keeping the energy consumption low while achieving high reliability. In our proposed protocol, the data forwarding probability is adaptively adjusted based on the measured loss conditions at the sink. So only for high loss rates, a node makes use of high transmission power to arrive at the sink. Whenever the loss rate is low, it adaptively lessens the transmission power. Since the source rebroadcasts the data, until the packet loss is minimized, high data reliability is achieved. By simulation results we show that the proposed protocol achieves high reliability while ensuring low energy consumption and overhead. Keywords— Sensor Networks, Reliability, overhead.