BEAR: A Balanced Energy-Aware Routing Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Energy aware routing protocols can be classified into energy saver and energy manager. Energy saver protocols decrease energy consumption totally. Most of them try to find the shortest path between source and destination to reduce energy consumption. But energy manager protocols balance energy consumption in network to avoid network partitioning. Finding best route only based on energy balancing consideration may lead to long path with high delay and decreases network lifetime. On the other hand, finding best route only with the shortest distance consideration may lead to network partitioning. This paper improves SEER [1] routing protocol. Traditional SEER is only energy saver and has poor idea about energy balancing. Our proposed protocol, named BEAR, considers energy balancing and optimal distance both. It finds a fair tradeoff between energy balancing and optimal distance by learning automata concept. We simulate and evaluate routing protocols by Glomosim [2] simulator.