Energy-aware routing in sensor networks: A large system approach

In many sensor networking environments, the sensor nodes have limited battery capacity and processing power. Hence, it is imperative to develop solutions that are energy-efficient and computationally simple. In this work, we present a simple static multi-path routing approach that is optimal in the large-system limit. In a network with energy replenishment, the largeness comes into play because the energy claimed by each packet is small compared to the battery capacity. This static routing scheme exploits the knowledge of the traffic patterns and energy replenishment statistics, but does not need to collect instantaneous information on node energy. We also develop a distributed solution of the optimal policy, as well as heuristics to build the set of pre-computed paths. The simulations verify that the static scheme outperforms leading dynamic routing algorithms in the literature, and is close to the optimal solution when the energy claimed by each packet is relatively small compared to the battery capacity.