Energy-Efficient Routing Protocols for IoT-Enabled Wireless Sensor Networks

The advancement of smart city infrastructure depends heavily on the deployment of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) to monitor environmental conditions, traffic, healthcare systems, and public safety in real time. However, the limited energy resources of sensor nodes pose a critical challenge to network longevity, data reliability, and service continuity. This research presents the design and evaluation of an adaptive energy-efficient routing protocol that dynamically integrates residual energy levels, spatial topology awareness, and traffic load adaptability into routing and cluster-head selection processes. Using simulation-based experiments, the proposed protocol was compared with benchmark schemes including LEACH, TEEN, and SEP under varying traffic and deployment conditions. Results reveal that the proposed approach significantly delays first-node-death, increases overall network stability, and sustains higher Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR)s across different traffic loads, while simultaneously improving throughput and reducing end-to-end delay. Statistical analysis confirms that these improvements are systematic and not incidental, validating the hypothesis that energy-efficient routing in WSNs requires a holistic and adaptive design. The findings emphasize the potential of such protocols in enabling cost-effective, reliable, and scalable WSN deployments for smart cities. Practical recommendations derived from this research highlight the importance of incorporating adaptive cluster-head selection, multipath routing, and traffic-awareness into network design, while encouraging pilot projects and integration with renewable energy and edge computing to further optimize performance. Collectively, the study provides a pathway for transforming WSNs into robust, energy-aware communication backbones that underpin sustainable urban intelligence systems.

The existing routing protocols for wireless sensor networks were not reasonable in design, which limited their application. Most of the existing studies did not take into account the energy consumption of the network and the balanced use of the energy of sensor nodes, which led to the unsatisfactory application effect of wireless sensor networks in some fields. Therefore, from the perspective of energy balance in wireless sensor networks, this paper proposed a construction method of an energy balance routing protocol in wireless sensor networks based on a fuzzy control strategy. Firstly, based on the analysis of the basic composition of wireless sensor networks and the structure of sensor nodes, this paper expounded the basic process of wireless data transmission and summarized the classification and characteristics of routing protocols in wireless sensor networks from different angles. Secondly, according to the node data transmission characteristics of wireless sensor networks, the energy balance use model of sensor nodes was established, and the design method of the energy balance routing protocol based on fuzzy control strategy was proposed, and the data transmission link was optimized. Finally, through experimental comparative analysis, the results showed that the energy balanced routing protocol proposed in this paper can effectively realize the energy balanced use of the network data transmission process. Compared with other common routing protocols, the wireless sensor network routing protocol proposed in this paper can not only improve the data transmission efficiency and reduce the data redundancy but also save energy consumption and prolong the network running time. The design method of routing protocol proposed in this paper will be conducive to the optimization and application of routing protocol in wireless sensor networks and provide a theoretical basis for the related research of wireless sensor networks.

Wireless sensor networks consist of small nodes with sensing, computation and wireless communication capabilities. Various architectures and node deployment strategies have been developed for wireless sensor network, depending upon the requirement of application. Sensor networks are used in different applications e.g. environmental monitoring, habitat monitoring, home automation, military application etc. In this paper we present survey of state-of-the-art of architecture and node deployment in wireless sensor network. We present the characteristics of the environment in which the sensor networks may deploy. Node deployment in wireless sensor network is application dependent and can be either deterministic or randomized. But in both the cases coverage of interested area is the main issue. We also explain the routing protocols for wireless sensor network.

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) play a necessary position in todays actual world applications. WSNs are a team of autonomous sensor nodes that are geographically distributed to accumulate information and monitor events. WSNs are similarly sense that they rely on wireless connectivity and spontaneous formation of networks so that sensor information can be transported via wireless. Sometimes called dust network, minute sensors as small as dust referring to smart dust. WSNs are spatially distributed two to screen or bodily temperature, sound, pressure, etc. and to cooperatively ignore their data via the network to different locations. Each such sensor network node has typically various parts. Routing in WSNs in one of the important technique, because all node executes its battery power, if may be one node failure it collapse entire networks. Routing in WSNs is in reality difficult due to the intrinsic characteristics that differentiate these networks from different networks. The plan of routing protocols in WSN is affected via number of exigent factors. In this paper, a review on routing protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) and performance of its execution.

Due to miniaturization of hardware and availability of low-cost, low-power sensors, Wireless Sensor Network and Multimedia Sensor Network applications are increasing day by day. Each application has a specific quality of service and experience requirements. The design of routing and MAC protocol which can fulfill the requirements of the application is challenging given the constrained nature of these devices. Considerable efforts are directed towards the design of energy efficient QoS-aware routing protocols. In this article, we present state of the art review of routing protocols for Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks while addressing the challenges and providing insight into research issues.

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have gained much attention in today’s research domain for supporting a wide variety of applications including the multimedia applications. Multimedia applications that are regarded as the quality-of-service (QoS)-aware, delay sensitive, and bandwidth hungry applications require enough energy and communication resources. WSNs being the energy-scarce network have now been designed in such a way that they can support these delay-sensitive and time-critical applications. In this paper, we propose an energy-efficient routing protocol for heterogeneous WSNs to support the delay sensitive, bandwidth hungry, time-critical, and QoS-aware applications. The proposed QoS-aware and heterogeneously clustered routing (QHCR) protocol not only conserves the energy in the network, but also provides the dedicated paths for the real-time and delay sensitive applications. The inclusion of different energy-levels for the heterogeneous WSNs also provides the stability in the networks while minimizing the delay for the delay-sensitive applications. Extensive simulations have been performed to validate the effectiveness of our proposed scheme. Our proposed routing scheme outperforms other state-of-the-art schemes in terms of the delay performances.

Introduction: This article is the result of the research “Energy efficient routing protocols in wireless sensor network: Examine the impact of M-SEEC routing protocols on the lifetime of WSN with an energy efficient TABU optimization routing protocol”developed in the IKG, Punjab Technical University, India in 2019.Problem: The task of finding and maintaining routes in WSNs is non-trivialsince energy restrictions and sudden changes in node status cause frequent and unpredictable changes.Objective: The objective of this paper is to propose an energy efficient heterogeneous protocolwith the help of a hybrid meta-heuristic technique.Methodology: In the hybrid meta-heuristic technique, the shortest route has been selected and the data forwarded to the sink in a minimal time span,savingenergy and making the network more stable. To evaluate the technique, a new hybrid technique has been created where the data transmission is implemented from the beginning under MATLAB 2013a.Results: The proposed technique is better than the existing ones since the remaining energy in the network is increased by 62% compared to normal nodes in MSEEC, 65% compared to advanced nodes in MSEEC and 70% compared to super nodes in MSEEC. The network lifetime was also enhanced by 70.8% compared to MSEEC.Conclusion: The proposed protocol was found to be superior based on the average residual energy.This paper proposes an efficient routing mechanism towards the energy efficient network.Originality: Through this research, a novel version of MSEEC protocol is carried out using the TABU search mechanism to generate the functions of two neighbourhoods to detect the optimum path with the aim of maximizing the network lifetime in an area of 200×200m2.Limitations: The lack of other routing techniques falls under swarm intelligence.

HEER – A delay-aware and energy-efficient routing protocol for wireless sensor networks

There are different applications of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). It can be deployed in various application areas such as monitoring of environment, surveillance, industrial automation, health-care, agriculture etc. A sensor node is usually a resource constrained device which has limited energy, processing power and memory. One of the important aspects of QoS aware routing protocols in WSNs is to send the delay sensitive data to a control station known as sink. In this paper, a delay sensitive cluster based routing protocol for wireless sensor networks is proposed. The purpose of clustering is to reduce energy consumption among the sensor nodes. The data forwarding mechanism of the protocol attempts to reduce end to end delay of delay sensitive traffic in reaching the sink. The protocol is evaluated through simulation using NS2.

Wireless sensor networks congestion occurs easily due to its centralized traffic pattern. Normally, mono-sync wireless sensor network experiences multiple traffic flow congestion in the dense environment of the network, which leads to excess energy consumption and severe packet loss. To overcome these issues, a congestion detection and alleviation mechanism using cluster based heuristic optimized hierarchical routing protocol is proposed in this paper. Here, congestion detection and alleviation utilize the features of sensor nodes. The congestion is categorized into two types: (i) node level congestion and (ii) link level congestion. The node level congestion is detected by assessing the buffer utilization and the interval amid the consecutive data packets. The link level congestion is considered with computing link usage utilizing back-off step of round robin carrier sense multi-access with collision avoidance. Congestion detection and alleviation reactively affected node/link through cuckoo hosted rider search multi-hop routing algorithm. It has two phases: the cluster head selection and multi-path routing. Cluster head selection is performed through Taylor multiple random forest kernel fuzzy C-means clustering algorithm and multi-path routing is performed through cuckoo hosted rider search multi-hop routing algorithm. The simulation of the proposed method is done in network simulator tool. Here, the performance metrics, like packet delivery ratio, delay, energy consumption, packet drop, overhead, network lifetime and throughput are calculated. The experimental outcomes of the proposed technique shows 11.6%, 18.4% and 28.1% lower delay, 78.2%, 65.4% and 52.6% higher packet delivery ratio, and 29.2%, 37.4% and 40.8% lower packet drop compared with the existing methods, like congestion detection and alleviation using multi-attribute decision-making in optimization-based hybrid congestion alleviation routing protocol in wireless sensor networks, congestion detection and alleviation using hybrid K-means with greedy best first search algorithms in packet rate reduction utilizing adaptive weight firefly algorithm ant colony optimization based routing protocol in wireless sensor networks and congestion detection and alleviation using multi-input time on task optimization algorithm for altered gravitational search algorithm routing protocol in wireless sensor networks.

The unique nature of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) poses new design challenges for development of applications, protocols and algorithms. In recent years, a substantial amount of research effort has been directed towards overcoming the underlying challenges to minimize energy consumption by the sensor nodes. The exchange of routing control packets has a significant impact on energy consumption from the small irreplaceable and non rechargeable batteries of the sensor nodes. In this paper, we propose a cross-layer adaptive routing (CLAR) protocol for WSNs, which aims to minimize the use of routing control packets in WSNs; thereby minimizing energy consumption which in turn prolongs network-lifetime. We also develop analytical model to derive energy consumption for route establishment and present simulation results, which reveal better performance and improved energy efficiency in WSNs when using the proposed cross-layer adaptive routing protocol.

QoSNET: An integrated QoS network for routing protocols in large scale wireless sensor networks

The selection of routing protocols is playing a major role in the device and proper utilization of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) that can help to provide better interconnection networks. On preserving the role of key performance, metric related to routing protocols is also an important and challenging task in the WSNs. Therefore, the sensor nodes life can be improved in efficient manner by using routing protocols that preserve the energy consumption and quality of service (QoS). Three different kinds of categories are used in the design of routing protocols which are data centric, hierarchical, and location-based approaches. Energy consumption can be improved by reducing the effect of redundancy level and transferring the passive motes sleep mode. The data transmission time also impacts on the energy conservation and QoS in WSNs. The surveillance and monitoring-related applications are the demanding research field in the WSNs that has to resolve the issue QoS routing in the manner of reliable data delivery. Energy consumption and QoS constraints are two complementary factors in the routing protocol, but the time delay factor can be involved in such a manner to satisfy both the performance metrics in routing protocol in WSNs.

One of the most important topics in the field of wireless sensor networks is the development of approaches to improve network lifetime. In this paper, an energy-efficient control and routing protocol for wireless sensor networks is presented. This algorithm is based on reinforcement learning for energy management in the network. This protocol seeks to optimize routing policies to maximize the long-term reward received by each node, using reinforcement learning, which is a machine learning approach. In order to improve the lifetime of wireless sensor network, three energy management approaches have been proposed. The first approach is to navigate correctly using reinforcement learning to reduce the length of the routes and to improve energy consumption. The second approach is to exploit a sleep scheduling technique to improve node energy consumption. The last approach is used to restrict data transmission of each node based on the received data change rate. Simulation results show that in terms of network lifespan, the proposed method significantly outperforms previous reported methods.

Wireless sensor networks are a new emerging area where swarm intelligence can be applied with interesting implications. In fact, a strong analogy between unicellular organism colonies and wireless sensor networks can be emphasized: a sensor network can be viewed as a “colony” of simple, scarce resource nodes that, autonomously, are able only to perform simple tasks, but all together can accomplish very complex problems. In this paper we propose a routing protocol for multisink Wireless Sensor Networks with interesting properties: self organization, fault tolerance and environmental adaptation. The proposed protocol was inspired by the well known behavior (in artificial life studies) of “Slime Mold”. Such colony of unicellular organisms organizes itself in clusters by pheromone generation and evaporation mechanisms. In a similar manner our protocol manages the data traffic towards multiple sink nodes using the gradient concept and reaching high levels of autonomy and fault tolerance. We analyze the proposed protocol to examine the performances, the signalling overhead and the adaptation properties to environmental changes or nodes faults using simulation techniques.