This paper presents a resource-aware and link quality based (RLQ) routing metric to address energy limitations and link quality variations as well as node heterogeneities in wireless sensor and actor networks (WSANs). The RLQ metric is a combined link cost metric, which is based on both energy efficiency and link quality statistics. The primary objective of the proposed metric is to adapt to varying wireless channel conditions, while exploiting the heterogeneous capabilities in WSANs. To accomplish this objective, it biases the use of resource-rich actor nodes over energy-constrained sensor nodes for packet forwarding and processing in the network. Also, different from most of the existing simulation based studies, this research effort is guided by extensive field experiments of link quality dynamics at various locations over a long period of time using recent sensor platforms, which realistically addresses the realworld wireless communication challenges in WSANs. Performance evaluations, via test-bed experiments, show that the RLQ routing metric achieves high performance in terms of packet reception rate, network throughput and network lifetime.

Keywords

Wireless sensor and actor networks, link-quality estimation, energy efficient routing.