Reliable routing in Wireless Mesh Networks (WMN)is an important need considering a wide deployment of WMNs. Though there are many routing metrics that could choose the best route assessing the hop count, link quality, congestion, queuing delay, interference and many other perturbations in wireless medium, there is no single routing metric that could assess all the perturbations simultaneously and find the best route. Integrating multiple metrics and finding a best route using a consolidated value calculated from those multiple metrics will be a better solution for it. We propose a dynamic and generic algorithm called Weighted Integrated Metrics (WIM), which can be used widely with any routing protocol for reliable routing with consistent throughput. The proposed algorithm performs well especially in highly unstable wireless medium with fast link quality variations and produces consistent higher throughput than existing schemes for integrating metrics. The simulation results using GloMoSim with our real radio API shows that WIM can perform better than the existing routing metrics and integrated metric schemes in highly unstable wireless medium.

Wireless Sensor Network is a highly distributed network of small and lightweight sensing nodes which are deployed in a large number at multiple locations. These networks are helpful in monitoring the system or environment. These sensor nodes performs sensing, processing and then communicating. Now a day's these networks are applied in various fields like military, defence, forest fire, medical, crisis management etc. In this paper it has been discussed about sensor network architecture and major factors affecting the wireless sensor networks. Routing is a major challenge faced by wireless sensor networks due to the dynamic nature of WSNs. Since energy efficient routing protocols are of major concern in the field of wireless sensor network. Therefore in further sections of this paper it has presented a brief review of different energy efficient routing protocols proposed for wireless sensor networks.