LQETA-RP: link quality based energy and trust aware routing protocol for wireless multimedia sensor networks

Owing to the resource constraint nature of Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks (WMSNs), effectively using the available energy of senor nodes playing vital role in the design of routing protocols. The basic Quality of Service requirements expected by many application scenarios of WMSNs are throughput, packet loss ratio, reliability, node energy and network life time. In order to satisfy these requirements, routing protocols of WMSNs has to concentrate on minimum energy route for data forwarding. Link quality analysis together with energy parameters is one of the major techniques for electing energy aware and reliable route path in WMSN. Sending multimedia data via dynamically changing wireless links adds the trust of each node in data forwarding as an important factor in route selection. The main feature of the paper is to predict the energy efficient reliable path for data forwarding using optimal forward node selection approach. With the aim of selecting the optimal forwarding node by means of link quality, energy and trust, a Link Quality based Energy and Trust Aware Routing Protocol (LQETA-RP) for WMSNs is proposed in this paper. In LQETA-RP, hardware and software based link performance indicators namely Link Quality Indicator, Received Signal Strength Indicator, Expected Transmission count and Trust based Link Cost Function (TLCF) are used for predicting the reliable and energy efficient route. TLCF for each node in the forwarding path leads to minimum energy utilization in route discovery and confirms very least packet drop ratio up to 10%. Simulation of the LQETA-RP is done using NS3 and the results were compared with the existing protocols namely EEPLQRR, LQER, LQEAR and TERP it shows that, Nodes energy consumption is saved by 30–40%, throughput increased by 10–15% and packet loss ratio is minimized in 30–40% approximately.