A routing metric for load balancing considering energy and delay constraints in wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Environmental conditions, energy, bandwidth, storage and processing constraints, application of wireless sensor network, especially in real-time usage faces serious challenges. Thus, providing methods for reliable data transmission at desirable rate which takes into consideration energy constraint is of great importance. In this paper, a routing metric is introduced for selection of intermediate nodes which transmit data between source and destination. This metric takes into account remaining energy of the node, buffer capacity, and transmission delay and link quality. It can be applied for directed diffusion. By analysis and simulation, we show its efficiency with respect to network lifetime, load balancing capability and end-to-end delay reduction. ©2008 IEEE.