An Interference Aware Heuristic Routing Protocol for Wireless Home Automation Networks

Abstract

Wireless Home Automation Networks consist of battery powered sensors and actuators that communicate with each other over wireless channels. The sensor nodes collect environmental information such as temperature, light intensity, humidity, and pressure to provide context-aware services and to facilitate smart home control. However, resource limitations, unpredictable topology changes, and interference introduce a number of challenges to the design of home automation protocols. One of the challenging tasks is developing energy efficient routing protocols to prolong the network lifetime. This paper proposes an interference aware heuristic routing protocol which determines the forwarding path between sensors and the base station using a heuristic function and a heuristic search algorithm. On the basis of local and global distance, longevity factor (LF), and link quality (LQ), the heuristic function generates a heuristic value for each node and this value is used in A ∗ search algorithm to determine the efficient route. Simulation results show that the proposed routing scheme outperforms GAHR and AODVjr protocols in terms of network lifetime, energy consumption, and message throughput. Furthermore, it achieves up to 15% increase in packet delivery ratio over GAHR protocol in a noisy environment.