A novel energy-efficient dynamic programming routing protocol in wireless multimedia sensor networks

Wireless multimedia sensor networks (WMSNs) have characteristics that may influence the routing decisions, such as limited energy resources, storage and computing capacity. Therefore, a routing optimization needs to be done to match the characteristics of the WMSNs. Existing routing protocols only consider energy efficiency regardless of energy threshold, maximum energy, and link cost collectively as the primary basis of routing. In this work, the energy-efficient dynamic programming (EEDP) protocol is proposed to optimize routing decisions that take into account the energy threshold, the maximum energy, and the link cost. Then, the protocol is compared with the dynamic programming (DP), and the ant colony optimization (ACO) protocol. The simulation results show that the EEDP protocol can improve energy efficiency of nodes and network lifetime of the WMSNs. Then, the EEDP protocol is also implemented into a network topology of 10 NodeMCU ESP32 devices. As a result, the EEDP protocol can work very well by selecting routes based on nodes that have the remaining energy above 50 and has the shortest distance. The average delay in sending data for the entire route for the 10 iterations of sending data is 3.99 seconds.