A Minimum Hop Routing Protocol for Home Security Systems Using Wireless Sensor Networks

A wireless sensor network is a data communication system that consists of from several to thousands of tiny wireless sensor nodes. These battery-powered sensor nodes cooperate with each other to accomplish data transmission. A variety of wireless sensor networks have been developed for different applications in the recent years. In this paper, a data routing protocol, which is designed for a wireless home security network, is proposed. Due to the lifetime of such a network depends entirely on the lifetime of the battery power, the proposed routing protocol chooses hop counts and battery power levels as metrics, in order to conserve as much energy as possible in both computations and data communications. In addition, when some of the nodes fail or run out of battery, the routing protocol could effectively adapt the change and find an alternative path. The robustness and the energy efficiency of the proposed routing protocol were tested, and the results turned out to be successful.

I. Introduction

Recent advances in micro fabrications and wireless communications technology have enabled the development of low-cost, small-sized, low-power-consuming, multifunctional sensor nodes, which are capable of communicating wirelessly in short distances with each other. A wireless sensor network could consist of from several to thousands of these tiny wireless sensor nodes, which can be added and removed conveniently to the network whenever it is necessary. It achieves the goals of low-cost and flexibility of deployment.