Energy-Efficient Data-Aware Routing Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

In many applications of wireless sensor networks, sensed data can be classified either normal or urgent data according to its time criticalness. Normal data such as periodic monitoring is loss and delay tolerant, but urgent data such as fire alarm is time critical and should be transferred to a sink with reliable. In this paper, by exploiting these data characteristics, we propose a novel energy-efficient data-aware routing protocol for wireless sensor networks, which provides a high reliability for urgent data and energy efficiency for normal data. In the proposed scheme, in order to enhance network survivability and reliability for urgent data, each sensor node forwards only urgent data when its residual battery level is below than a threshold. Also, the proposed scheme uses different data delivery mechanisms depending on the data type. The normal data is delivered to the sink using a single-path-based data forwarding mechanism to improve the energy-efficiency. Meanwhile, the urgent data is transmitted to the sink using a directional flooding mechanism to guarantee high reliability. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme could significantly improve the network lifetime, along with high reliability for urgent data delivery.