Asian Journal of Research in Computer Science

Ad-hoc routing algorithms in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) rely on nodes’ position awareness by regularly updating routing data of neighbouring nodes. Meanwhile, the transmission energy usage is not optimised as a result of this repeated updates and routing table deployment. Therefore, it is very critical to consider techniques of optimising or conserving energy in the design of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) in order to prolong the lifetime of the individual nodes. One of these techniques is the Cross-layer design which, is considered as an efficient method for addressing this challenge with WSNs. In this paper, we propose a Cross-Layer Energy Efficient (CLEE) routing algorithm to establish an optimal route from the source node to the destination node by selecting candidate nodes from neighbouring nodes based on the distance between these nodes and the rate of energy consumption by a possible candidate node. Then to select a designated node from the candidate nodes, the algorithm further computes the Signal Strength Quality (SQS) and the Link Lifetime (LL) as well as the Throughput (TH) rate of selected nodes. The proposed algorithm was simulated with a network size of 600 X 600 on Network Simulator 3 (NS3) in order to analyse its performance. An evaluation of the performance of the proposed CLEE protocol with existing similar protocols such as Ad-hoc On-Demand Distance Vector (AODV) and Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) reveals that CLEE outperformes AODV and DSR by conserving about 44% of available energy.