LQER: A Link Quality Estimation based Routing for Wireless Sensor Networks

Routing protocols are crucial to self-organize wireless sensor networks (WSNs), which have been widely studied in recent years. For some specific applications, both energy aware and reliable data transmission need to be considered together. Historical link status should be captured and taken into account in making data forwarding decisions to achieve the data reliability and energy efficiency tradeoff. In this paper, a dynamic window concept (m, k) is presented to record the link historical information and a link quality estimation based routing protocol (LQER) are proposed, which integrates the approach of minimum hop field and (m, k). The performance of LQER is evaluated by extensive simulation experiments to be more energy-aware, with lower loss rate and better scalability than MHFR [1] and MCR [2]. Thus the WSNs with LQER get longer lifetime of networks and better link quality.