IMPLEMENTATION & PERFORMANCE EVALUATION OF ENERGY EFFICIENT ROUTING FOR WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks consist of small battery operated nodes with sensing, computation, and wireless communications capabilities. These sensor networks are emerging as a new tool for military and civil applications such as target field imaging, intrusion detection and detecting ambient conditions such as temperature, movement, sound, light, etc. Stringent energy and resource constraints are the main limitations for these applications. The most prominent problem in a sensor network is routing the data in an energy efficient way to the base station. The problem with the current routing protocols for wireless sensor networks is that they are application dependent. In this dissertation work, we propose an energy efficient multihop routing protocol suitable for any type of application based on the PULSE protocol. The proposed protocol makes use of a periodic flood from base stations for routing and synchronization. The synchronization allows idle nodes to power-off their radios for maximum duration, thus resulting in energy savings. The flood forms a spanning tree routed at the base station. The nodes transmit data to the base station by reserving the path. The data from several nodes are combined dynamically as per application requirements before forwarding to the base station. The dissertation work involves implementation and simulation of the protocol. Results show that the protocol is more energy efficient than the PUSLE protocol and can be used for different types of applications. The proposed protocol is implemented using Network Embedded System C (NESC) a language specific for TINYOS operating system. It is tested using mica2 motes. TOSSIM simulator is used to simulate the protocol for different network sizes. JAVA-programming language is used for the implementation of data gathering application.