BERP: Balanced Energy Routing Protocol for routing around connectivity holes in wireless sensor networks

As sensor nodes are resource constrained, so it is mandatory to use these resources in an efficient way. Energy consumption is one of the important metrics that needs to be utilized carefully, to prevent connectivity holes. Many location based energy aware routing protocols (PAGER-M, GEAR, OGF, ALBA-R) already developed to route data packets, minimize energy consumption and to extend the lifetime of sensor nodes. These protocols do not consider the death of first node as a metric and there is unbalanced energy consumption among the sensor nodes. As a result, some nodes drain out their energy which leads to the connectivity holes in the network. In this paper, we developed BERP (Balanced Energy Routing Protocol), a protocol for energy efficient routing in wireless sensor networks. To balance energy among nodes, this protocol selects alternative paths to deliver data from source to destination. In addition to this, BERP checks the energy level of all sensor nodes continuously and declare the node as a connectivity hole whose residual energy is nearly zero. This protocol broadcasts the information of connectivity holes in the network. The simulation results confirm that BERP performs better in terms of packet delivery ratio, end to end latency, energy consumption and throughput.