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Energy‐efficient network protocols and algorithms for wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks have recently received tremendous attention from both academia and industry because of their promise of numerous potential applications in both civilian and military areas. A wireless sensor network consists of a large number of small sensor nodes with sensing, data processing, and communication capabilities, which are deployed in a region of interest and collaborate to accomplish a common task, such as environmental monitoring, industry process control, and military surveillance. Distinguished from traditional wireless networks, a sensor network has many unique characteristics, such as denser node deployment, higher unreliability of sensor nodes, asymmetric data transmission, and severe power, computation, and memory constraints, which present many new challenges for the development and eventual application of wireless sensor networks. In particular, sensor nodes are usually battery-powered and should operate without attendance for a relatively long period of time. In most cases, it is very difficult and even impossible to change or recharge batteries for these sensor nodes. For this reason, energy efficiency is of vital importance for the operational lifetime of a sensor network. To prolong the lifetime of a sensor network, energy efficiency must be considered in almost every aspect of sensor network design, not only at the physical layer and the link layer but also at the network and higher layers. From the networking perspective, energy efficiency must be considered in the design of various network protocols and algorithms for topology discovery, self-organization, medium access control, routing, data aggregation, fault-tolerance, etc. An energy-efficient network protocol or algorithm can provide significant power savings in individual sensor nodes and thus prolong the lifetime of the entire network. With a large amount of recent research efforts, significant research progress has been made in the design of energy-efficient network protocols and algorithms. The purpose of this special issue is to expose the readership of Wiley International Journal of Communication System to the latest research progress in this aspect. In this special issue, we are pleased to present a collection of eight outstanding research papers, which cover a variety of topics in the design of energy-efficient network protocols and algorithms for wireless sensor networks. In the first paper ‘An Energy-Efficient Multipath Routing Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks,’ Lu and Wong propose a distributed multipath routing protocol to search multiple node-disjoint paths between a source node and the sink. A load balancing algorithm is also proposed to distribute traffic over the multiple paths discovered. Moreover, a comparison between the proposed routing scheme and several existing routing protocols is also presented. In the second paper ‘Efficient Delaunay-based Localized Routing for Wireless Sensor Networks,’ Wang and Li study the performance of several routing protocols on localized Delaunay triangulation and propose a new routing method based on both localized Delaunay triangulation and geographic routing. The proposed routing method makes a routing decision