ECORS: Energy consumption-oriented route selection for wireless sensor network

Automated metering infrastructure is employed widely in scientific fields as well as in industrial and commercial areas due to the development of wireless sensor network (WSN) technology. WSNs provide important features such as wireless multi-hop communication and they are easy to install everywhere; thus, extending the lifetime of WSNs is highly desirable. All WSN nodes consume a limited amount of energy from the battery during operations such as sensing, calculating, control, and communication and most of the power consumption is attributable to wireless communication. In this study, we propose energy consumption-oriented route selection (ECORS), which is a route selection algorithm that focuses on the remaining energy and energy consumption by WSN nodes. In ECORS, a sink node calculates all of the routes in the system by using the route lifetime (RL) as a metric according to the minimum residual energy (MRE) and the expected route cost (ERC). The route with the longest RL is selected by the proposed algorithm. By changing the route periodically using ECORS, the WSN system lasts 1.14 times longer as compared to that when the routes are fixed. We evaluated the performance of ECORS using an original WSN simulator. In realistic simulations, we measured the distance-packet error rate, current consumption, and discharge characteristic of a battery using actual sensor nodes assembled with an Arduino micro controller, XBee ZigBee wireless module, and lithium-polymer battery.