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A Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is set of self-organized sensor nodes connected together to monitor the area under study (Akyildiz et al., 2002, Basagni et al., 2004 as shown in Figure 1. Sensor nodes can be mobile or stationary nodes, which are able to perform various tasks as in Ge, et al. (2016).
Each sensor node can sense data from the physical environment, process this data to extract important information, store this information, and communicate with the other nodes through wireless links between them until the packets are received by the base station or sink node as shown in Figure 2. From all processes that sensor nodes can perform, communication is the most power consuming process as mentioned by Khan and Goodridge (2015). Energy is the main limitation of WSN as sensor nodes are battery powered and at the same time, it is not possible to charge or replace these batteries as WSN may be used in mission-critical environments such as military or rescue applications (Toh, 2002). Using energy aware routing protocol will be very helpful in minimizing power consumption, as the routing protocol is responsible for communication, where sensor nodes waste most of their battery power in communication (Mostafaei & Menth, 2018).
In mobile ad-hoc networks, routing protocols are classified into two main categories (Moond, et al., 2014; Taneja & Kush, 2010). The first category is proactive or table-driven routing protocols. In proactive routing protocols, such as Destination Sequenced Distance Vector (DSDV) protocol presented by Perkins and Bhagwat (1994), and Optimized Link State Routing (OLSR) protocol presented by Jacquet, et al. (2001), each node builds a routing table and saves a route for each destination before starting the communication. Routing tables need to be updated to be ready for data forwarding. The second category is reactive routing protocols. Ad-hoc On Demand Distance Vector (AODV) protocol, proposed by Perkins, et al. (2003), and Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) protocol proposed by Johnson and Maltz (1996) and modified by Ali, et al. (2018) are examples of reactive routing protocols in which routes between source and destination are built when there is a need for sending data through it. Reactive routing protocols are more suitable for wireless sensor networks as they reduce the number of messages needed to build the routes, which will consequently reduce power consumption.