RER: a real time energy efficient routing protocol for query-based applications in wireless sensor networks

Energy-aware routing protocols can be classified into two categories, energy savers and energy balancers. Energy saver protocols are used to minimize the overall energy consumed by a wireless sensor network (WSN), while energy balancer protocols efficiently distribute the consumption of energy throughout the network. Energy saver protocols are not necessarily good at balancing energy consumption and energy balancer protocols are not always efficient at reducing energy consumption. On the other hand, although delay is another important factor for WSNs energy-aware protocols do not take care of it. This paper proposes a real time energy efficient routing protocol for query-based applications in WSNs, which offers an efficient trade-off between traditional energy balancing and energy saving objectives while supporting a soft real time packet delivery. This is achieved by means of fuzzy sets and learning automata techniques along with zonal broadcasting to decrease total energy consumption.