Research Article
Chandrika M. Dixit, Manjima R.
Abstract
Routing is a process of determining a path between source and destination upon request of data transmission. In multi-hop networks the source node cannot reach the sink directly. So, intermediate sensor nodes have to relay their packets. Some sensor network applications only require the successful delivery of messages between a source and a destination. However, there are applications that need even more assurance. These are the real-time requirements of the message delivery, and in parallel, the maximization of network lifetime. WSNs which are generally composed of large number of nodes are packet-switched wireless systems that share many properties with the other networks. These nodes have severely limited energy, processing, communication, and storage resources. Therefore for reliable and consistent communication in WSN, the lifetime of the network, scalability, heterogeneity, node deployment, fault tolerance, communication range and mobility play a major role. Lifetime is the most important concern in wireless sensor networks due to limited battery power of sensor nodes. In this paper, we focus on designing an energy-efficient and energy-aware routing algorithm with cross layer architecture to increase the operational lifetime with improved data rate in multi-hop wireless sensor networks in the presence of unreliable communication links. The implementation considers both node and link specific parameters. Simulation results reveal that the proposed algorithm can outperform other existing schemes in term of the network lifetime and data rate.