Load-Balance Energy Aware Ad-Hoc On Demand Multipath Distance Vector Routing Protocol (LBEA-AOMDV) for WSN

Abstract

Nowadays, WSNs have received great importance because they are the best solutions that can be used in harsh environments. The main limitation in WSNs is the node power because the sensor node is battery powered and charging or replacing this battery is not applicable. Moreover, in mission-critical applications, sensor nodes can sense important data and the packet carrying this data must be given higher priority from the routing protocol. Most of the current routing protocols consider the node power but do not consider different paths for different priority data which may cause them to be delayed. This article proposes a load-balance energy aware ad-hoc on demand multipath distance vector (LBEA-AOMDV) protocol for wireless sensor networks, which is a multipath routing protocol, based on the original AOMDV. The proposed protocol shows that the paths are alternatively discovered on basis of an energy metric and instead of using only one path in data transmission, the network load is distributed through different paths. LBEA-AOMDV also uses a priority-based technique in which packets are assigned different priority levels and guided to different paths. The overall simulation results show that LBEA-AOMDV gives better performance when compared with AOMDV in terms of average consumed energy, end-to-end delay, number of dropped packets, average throughput and normalized routing load.