A wireless sensor network contains hundreds or thousands of a set of sensor devices that have ability to communicate either directly to the Base Station (BS) or among each other. The nodes in WSNs are usually battery operated sensing devices with limited energy resources and replacing or replenishing the batteries is usually not an option. Thus energy efficiency is one of the most important issues and designing power efficient protocols is critical for prolonging the lifetime. There are two competing objectives in the design of WSNs. The first objective is the capability to exchange large amount of data between the nodes and the base station. The second constraining objective is minimizing the energy consumption. The two competing objectives reveal the importance of efficient routing protocol in WSNs. Therefore, many routing algorithms have been proposed due to the challenges in designing an energy efficient network. |
