Energy and congestion aware routing based on hybrid gradient fields for wireless sensor networks

The principles of physics and system sciences are increasingly used in the field of network engineering to design network protocols. This work proposes an energy and congestion aware routing (ECAR) algorithm inheriting the concepts of the potential field. It uses depth and time-variant network parameters to forward the data packets through low congestion and an energy-balanced path. We define a novel forward aware energy density as a decision metric along with residual energy and queue-length for forwarding data packets. It results in network-wide balanced residual energy and enhanced network lifetime. The proposed ECAR algorithm is evaluated for the transmission rounds before the first dead node (FDN) is detected. It is found that in typical traffic conditions, there was an average increment of 45% transmission rounds till the FDN appeared. Moreover, the simulated and theoretical findings are compared using statistical measures that justify its energy and congestion awareness.