Energy-Efficient Forwarding Routing Algorithm with bidirectional link quality estimator for Wireless Sensor Networks

This work proposes a low energy forwarding routing algorithm for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN). The proposed algorithm is based on the Minimum Cost Forwarding Algorithm (MCFA) and utilizes a cost function in order to determine the best transmission routes with the lowest energy consumption. The proposed cost function is calculated considering the link quality between nodes and the transmission cost of the neighboring nodes. The link quality is estimated in a bidirectional way, which means it considers reception quality and transmission quality, and is power aware. For the reception quality WMEWMA is used, and for the transmission quality the power of the transceiver and the number of transmission attempts are considered. The performance of the proposed algorithm is tested in three scenarios and compared with the performance in the same scenarios of MCFA as routing algorithm with WMEWMA as cost function. For the purpose of testing, physical nodes were designed and built using ATmega328P microprocessor and nRF24L01 transceiver.