LEO: An innovative metric for energy-efficient routing in wireless sensor networks

This paper introduces Low Energy and Overhead (LEO), a novel metric for energy-efficient wireless sensor networks (WSNs) routing. LEO prioritizes routes with low energy consumption by considering both transmission reliability and power. Unlike traditional metrics that rely on hop count or link quality indicator (LQI), LEO leverages the relationship between packet reception rate (PRR) and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) to estimate link reliability and energy efficiency. LEO effectively reduces energy consumption and extends network lifetime by selecting routes with high PRR and low transmission power. This metric has a clear advantage: its calculation is passive and does not require difficult-to-obtain values. Additionally, the paper presents an automatic transmission power adjustment (ATPC) algorithm that further optimizes energy usage by dynamically adapting transmission power based on link quality. Through extensive simulations, LEO demonstrates significant energy savings compared to hop count and ZigBee LQI metrics, making it a promising solution for energy-constrained WSNs. • Proposition of wireless sensor mesh network routing metric and automatic transmission power adjustment protocol. • The major aspects of proposed algorithm: Energy-aware, low overhead, reliable paths. • The simulation results confirmed that the LEO metric had better results than the other compared metrics.