Energy-saving routing metric for aggregate low-rate wireless sensor networks

Low-rate wireless sensor networks based on the IEEE 802.15.4 standard are widely used for gathering information from wireless sensors. Such data aggregation requires the deployment of route tree structure for “many-to-one” routing scheme. In this article, we propose energy-saving routing metric, which takes into account both link quality and node initial energy values. For more detailed research, experimental measurements of relationships between packet delivery ratio and link quality have been performed. The results of these experiments were used in simulation and performance analysis of proposed metric. Developed model of WSN allows to simulate network operation at presence of message retransmissions, which can be needed at low quality links. The performance comparison with a number of existing routing metrics (HopCount, ZigBee, ETX, LE-RPL metrics) has been provided. Results of the comparison shows that proposed metric significantly improves network lifetime and average node lifetime in the case of wide dispersed initial energy of sensor nodes.