CLEARP: A CROSS-LAYER ENERGY-AWARE ROUTING PROTOCOL FOR QOS-ENHANCED WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) play a central role in the realization of mission-critical applications which include, environmental monitoring, disaster response, and industrial automation. Nevertheless, the interaction of extreme energy requirements and wireless and changeable tie in demand routing protocols that are capable of maximizing energy efficiency, reliability of data, as well as quality of service (QoS). In the proposed work a new Cross Layer Energy Aware Routing Protocol (CLEARP), which is to dynamically combine essential parameters of the MAC and Network layers, such as the queue length, remaining energy level, and link quality within a unified routing cost model that can be used to determine the cost effective routing path. The protocol implements energy-aware thresholding technique to avoid draining the nodes and a self-adaptive reconfiguration strategy to ensure that the performance of a network remains good in different network conditions. In the NS2.35 simulation platform, CLEARP is applied and compared with the common routing protocols like AODV and LEACH. The simulated results on varied network scenarios establish that, the CLEARP delivers 7- 10% improvement in packet delivery ratio, a 15% decrease in end to end delay, and a 20% energy saving and a 12 to 18% increase over the overall network lifetime than the existing protocols. The added protocol also provides a 10% and more throughput increment at high-density traffic. These performances are reasons as to why CLRP is efficient as far as improving cross-layer communication and provision of reliable and energy efficient data transmission in resource-limited WSN is concerned.