Load balancing metric with diversity for energy efficient routing in wireless sensor networks

The expected number of transmission (ETX) represents a routing metric that considers the highly variable link qualities for a specific radio in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). To adapt to these differences, radio diversity is a recently explored solution for WSNs. In this paper, we propose an energy balancing metric which explores the diversity in link qualities present at different radios. The goal is to effectively use the energy of the network and therefore extend the network lifetime. The proposed metric takes into account the transmission and reception costs for a specific radio in order to choose an energy efficient radio. In addition, the metric uses the remaining energy of nodes in order to regulate the traffic so that critical nodes are avoided. We show by simulations that our metric can improve the network lifetime up to 20%. © 2011 Published by Elsevier Ltd