Tree Based Energy and Congestion Aware Routing Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have inherent and unique characteristics rather than traditional networks. They have many different constraints, such as computational power, storage capacity, energy supply and etc; of course the most important issue is their energy constraint. Energy aware routing protocol is very important in WSN, but routing protocol which only considers energy has not efficient performance. Therefore considering other parameters beside energy efficiency is crucial for protocols efficiency. Depending on sensor network application, different parameters can be considered for its protocols. Congestion management can affect routing protocol performance. Congestion occurrence in network nodes leads to increasing packet loss and energy consumption. Another parameter which affects routing protocol efficiency is providing fairness in nodes energy consumption. When fairness is not considered in routing process, network will be partitioned very soon and then the network performance will be decreased. In this paper a Tree based Energy and Congestion Aware Routing Protocol (TECARP) is proposed. The proposed protocol is an energy efficient routing protocol which tries to manage congestion and to provide fairness in network. Simulation results shown in this paper imply that the TECARP has achieved its goals.