An energy-efficient data dissemination protocol for wireless sensor networks

Abstract

The design process of protocols for wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is primarily concerned with tackling special issues inherent to WSNs, such as limited energy (or battery power), computation, communication, and storage capabilities, with energy being the most crucial resource for sensor nodes. This paper proposes LAMaR, a location-aided and maximum remaining energy-based data dissemination protocol for WSNs, with a goal to prolong the network lifetime. LAMaR exploits the geometric properties of Voronoi diagram and introduces the concepts of proxy forwarders and intermediate forwarder chains to build energy-efficient dissemination paths. We show that LAMaR, which favors disseminating data over short distances, achieves an energy gain in the order of 55% for the free space model and close to 100% for the multi-path model compared to BVGF and GPSR, which forward data through long distances. We also prove that the use of proxy forwarders yields an energy gain in the order of 30% in comparison with a similar protocol which does not use the concept of proxy forwarders