Energy aware efficient geographic routing in lossy wireless sensor networks with environmental energy supply

Wireless sensor networks are characterized by multihop wireless lossy links and resource constrained nodes. Energy efficiency is a major concern in such networks. In this paper, we study Geographic Routing with Environmental Energy Supply (GREES) and propose two protocols, GREES-L and GREES-M, which combine geographic routing and energy efficient routing techniques and take into account the realistic lossy wireless channel condition and the renewal capability of environmental energy supply when making routing decisions. Simulation results show that GREESs are more energy efficient than the corresponding residual energy based protocols and geographic routing protocols without energy awareness. GREESs can maintain higher mean residual energy on nodes, and achieve better load balancing in terms of having smaller standard deviation of residual energy on nodes. Both GREES-L and GREES-M exhibit graceful degradation on end-to-end delay, but do not compromise the end-to-end throughput performance. Kai Zeng received his B.E. degree in Communication Engineering and M.E. degree in Communication and Information System both from Huazhong University of Science and Technology, China, in 2001 and 2004, respectively. He is currently a Ph.D. student in the Electrical and Computer Engineering department at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. His research interests are in the areas of wireless ad hoc and sensor networks with emphases on energy-efficient protocol, cross-layer design, routing, and network security. Kui Ren received his B. Eng. and M. Eng. both from Zhejiang University, China, in 1998 and 2001, respectively. He worked as a research assistant at Shanghai Institute of Microsystem and Information Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences from March 2001 to January 2003, at Institute for Infocomm Research, Singapore from January 2003 to August 2003, and at Information and Communications University, South Korea from September 2003 to June 2004. Currently he is a PhD candidate in the ECE department at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. His research interests include ad hoc/sensor network security, wireless mesh network security, Internet security, and security and privacy in ubiquitous computing environments. Wenjing Lou is an assistant professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering department at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. She obtained her Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from University of Florida in 2003. She received the M.A.Sc. degree from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, in 1998, the M.E. degree and the B.E. degree in Computer Science and Engineering from Xi’an Jiaotong University, China, in 1996 and 1993 respectively. From December 1997 to July 1999, she worked as a Research Engineer in Network Technology Research Center, Nanyang Technological University. Her current research interests are in the areas of ad hoc and sensor networks, with emphases on network and system security and routing. Patrick J. Moran received his MSEE from Carnegie Mellon University, 1993. He is currently the CTO and Founder of AirSprite Technologies Inc, and is driving the company to utilize advanced networking protocols for low-power wireless network systems. His interests include architecture, protocols and high performance implementation of emerging communication technologies. Patrick has been involved in deployment of communication and signal processing technologies since graduating from the University of Minn. in 1986. He holds several patents and publications relating to storage, medical and data processing information systems. He is a member of the IEEE.