The gradual increase in the maturity of sensor electronics has resulted in the increasing demand for wireless sensor networks for many industrial applications. One of the industrial platforms for efficient usage and deployment of sensor networks is smart grids. The critical network traffic in smart grids includes both delay-sensitive and delay-tolerant data for real-time and non-real-time usage. To facilitate these traffic requirements, the asynchronous working-sleeping cycle of sensor nodes can be used as an opportunity to create a node connection. Efficient use of wireless sensor network in smart grids depends on various parameters like working-sleeping cycle, energy consumption, network lifetime, routing protocol, and delay constraints. In this paper, we propose an energy-efficient multi-disjoint path opportunistic node connection routing protocol (abbreviated as EMOR) for sensor nodes deployed in neighborhood area network. EMOR utilizes residual energy, availability of sensor node's buffer size, working-sleeping cycle of the sensor node and link quality factor to calculate optimum path connectivity after opportunistic connection random graph and spanning tree formation. The multi-disjoint path selection in EMOR based on service differentiation of real-time and non-real-time traffic leads to an improvement in packet delivery rate, network lifetime, end-end delay and total energy consumption.
Keywords: asynchronous working–sleeping cycle strategy; energy-efficient routing protocol; energy-efficient wireless sensor networks; multipath opportunistic node connection; neighborhood area network; opportunistic connection random graph; service differentiation in smart grids; smart grids.