| Abstract: | Wireless mesh network (WMN) can sense information and realize end‐network transmission. It consists of numerous wireless sensors, the energy and communication ability of which are limited. A kind of novel VPF‐based energy‐balanced routing strategy for WMN has been presented in this paper. Most of the existing energy‐efficient routing strategy always forwards packets along the minimum energy path to the sink to merely minimize energy consumption, which causes an unbalanced distribution of residual energy among sensor nodes, and eventually results in a network partition. We design the energy‐balanced routing strategy by setting up a mixed virtual potential field in terms of depth and energy by using the physical potential concept. The strategy can force packets to move toward the sink through the dense energy area and protect the nodes, which has relatively low residual energy. By comparing to the other energy‐efficient routing strategy in our designed scenarios, the experimental results show that energy balance and throughput can be improved. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. |
