The nodes in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are responsible for communicating data which is primarily of three types viz. video, audio and text. In literature, a large number of energy aware and shortest path based route selection approaches have been proposed to enhance the routing efficiency in WSNs. Most of these route selection approaches are designed by assuming fixed type and size of data packets and results in the same path selection for all types of data. This path selection, does not consider data size and data priority, results in high contention losses, topology failures and non-uniformity in energy depletion of nodes. In this paper, a route selection approach which is based on the preservation of network connectivity for improving overall network lifetime has been proposed for applications where sensor nodes are required to transmit different types of data. The proposed approach preserve highly connected edges at the initial rounds of data communication in an energy efficient manner, such that network connectivity would be maintained even at later rounds of data communications. The proposed route selection approach, VDR, (Variable Data rate Routing) has been simulated with both proactive and reactive route maintenance strategies. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm with both proactive and reactive route maintenance strategies result in better network lifetime, energy consumption, overall network connectivity, packet delivery ratio as compared to the existing State-of-the-Art energy efficient route selection approaches with proactive and reactive route maintenance strategies. The results also show that the proposed algorithm is scalable and performs better than the compared algorithms both at low node density and high node density.

无线传感器网络（WSN）中的节点负责通信数据，该数据主要是三种类型。视频，音频和文本。在文献中，已经提出了大量基于能量感知和基于最短路径的路由选择方法，以提高WSN中的路由效率。这些路由选择方法中的大多数是通过假设数据包的类型和大小是固定的来设计的，并且对于所有类型的数据都会导致相同的路径选择。该路径选择未考虑数据大小和数据优先级，从而导致较高的竞争损失，拓扑故障以及节点的能量消耗不均匀。在本文中，对于要求传感器节点传输不同类型数据的应用，已经提出了一种基于路由选择方法的方法，该方法基于网络连接的保留以提高整体网络寿命。所提出的方法以能量有效的方式在数据通信的初始回合中保留高度连接的边缘，使得即使在随后的数据通信回合中也将维持网络连接性。提议的路由选择方法VDR（可变数据速率路由）已通过主动和被动路由维护策略进行了仿真。仿真结果表明，所提算法同时具有主动和被动路由维护策略，可以延长网络寿命，降低能耗，提高整体网络连通性，与现有的采用主动和被动路由维护策略的最新节能路由选择方法相比，数据包的传输率。结果还表明，所提出的算法在低节点密度和高节点密度下均具有可扩展性，并且比比较算法具有更好的性能。