An energy efficient and QoS aware routing protocol for wireless sensor and actuator networks

Wireless sensor and actuator networks are composed of sensor and actuator nodes interconnected via wireless links. The actuators are responsible for taking prompt decisions and react accordingly to the data gathered by sensor nodes. In order to ensure efficient actions in such networks, we propose a new routing protocol that provides QoS in terms of delay and energy consumption. The network is organized in clusters supervised by CHs (Cluster-Heads), elected according to important metrics, namely the energy capability, the riches of connectivity, which is used to select the CH with high node density, and the accessibility degree regarding all the actuators. The latter metric is the distance in number of hops of sensor nodes relative to the actuator nodes. This metric enhances more the network reliability by reducing the communication delay when alerting the actuator nodes, and hence, reducing the energy consumption. To reach efficiently the actuator nodes, we design a delay and energy sensitive routing protocol based on-demand routing approach. Our protocol incurs less delay and is energy efficient. We perform an evaluation of our approach through simulations. The obtained results show out performance of our approach while providing effective gain in terms of communication delay and energy consumption.