QuESt: A QoS-based energy efficient sensor routing protocol

Rapid penetration of smart wireless devices and enormous growth of wireless communication technologies has already set the stage for deployment of wireless sensor networks (WSNs). While these small sensor nodes are often considered as the future of wireless communications, they also suffer from energy constraints. On the other hand, with increasing demand for real-time services in next generation wireless networks, quality-of-service (QoS)-based routing has emerged as an interesting research topic. Naturally offering some QoS-guarantee in sensor networks raises significant challenges. The network needs to cope up with battery-constraints, while providing precise QoS (end-to-end delay and bandwidth requirement) guarantee. More precisely, designing such QoS-protocols, optimizing multiple objectives, is computationally intractable. Based on the multi-objective genetic algorithm (MOGA), in this paper we propose a QoS-based energy-efficient sensor routing (QuESt) protocol that determines application-specific, near-optimal sensory-routes demand, by optimizing multiple QoS parameters, (end-to-end delay and bandwidth requirements) and energy consumption. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed protocol is capable of discovering a set of QoS-based, near-optimal routes, even with imprecise network information.