An integrated link quality estimation-based routing for wireless sensor networks

With the rapid increase in low cost sensor devices, internet of things (IoT) has become more and more popular. Wireless sensor network (WSN) is commonly recognized as the core technology of IoT, which has become a hot research area in both academic and industry recently. Because of unreliable and unpredictable behaviors of WSN, intelligent routing selection is crucial to WSN. To provide good quality of service (QoS) guarantee and reduce energy consuming, some routing protocols in WSN consider link-quality estimation on the routing selection. Most of them consider little with the stability of link quality and the weights of varying. This paper proposed a novel routing selection algorithm in WSN, called integrated link quality estimation-based routing protocol (I-LQER). I-LQER firstly analyzed the energy consuming model, added the different weights for the elements in link-quality estimation, and then established a metric for the stability of link quality. I-LQER considered both the link quality and the stability of link quality to support better QoS. For evaluating the performance of I-LQER, we made extensive simulation experiments in network simulator-2 (NS-2). The simulation results show that I-LQER gives better performance in terms of end-to-end delay, scalability and energy consumption, compared with the link quality estimation-based routing (LQER).