Traffic and Energy Aware Routing for Heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Networks

The energy -efficiency of routing algorithm is crucial for improving the lifetime of battery constrained wireless sensor networks (WSNs). The consideration of nodes heterogeneity in routing is essential for achieving optimal resource utilization. This letter considers sensor nodes with random initial energies and random disparities in data generation rate (traffic) to model a realistic clustering-based WSN suited for heterogeneous sensing applications. The letter presents an energy model for the scenario and proposes a traffic and energy aware routing (TEAR) scheme to improve the stability period. The simulation results indicate that TEAR outperforms other clustering-based routing algorithms under the scenario.