Energy aware routing in heterogeneous multi-hop public safety wireless networks

Public safety networks are receiving more attention and priority in the several countries as the state authorities deal with unsuspected situations and natural disasters. Heterogeneous wireless networks with wireless devices supporting multitude of radio access technologies are witnessing increasing interest from public safety consumers. Energy efficiency in such networks has become an important design consideration due to the limited battery life of mobile terminals may affect the emergency operations that public safety agents have to face. In this paper, we present a routing protocol for multi-radio multi-hop public safety wireless networks, which aims to achieve a trade-off between energy consumption in the network and routing delay, considering both the energy consumption at the devices and the link energy costs. We also present optimum route-path selection strategies by defining a utility function to minimize the energy consumption in the network while maximizing the network lifetime. Using simulations, we verify the utility of the route-path selection strategies and the efficiency of the energy aware routing algorithm. It turns out that the proposed protocol is energy efficient in terms of path selection, with a slight compromise in the end-to-end delay.