Scalable and Energy-efficient Routing for Large-scale Wireless Sensor Networks

Large-scale wireless sensor networks consist of thousands of tiny and low cost devices with very limited energy, computing power and communication capabilities. Therefore, communication protocols must be designed with scalability and resource scarcity in mind. In this paper, we propose the scalable energy-efficient location-aided routing (SELAR) protocol for wireless sensor networks as a scalable and energy-efficient routing solution for large-scale wireless sensor networks. In SELAR, nodes use location and energy information of the neighboring nodes to perform the routing function. Further, the sink node is moved during the network operation to avoid the energy depletion problem and increase the network lifetime. By means of simulations, the SELAR protocol is evaluated and compared with two very well-known protocols - LEACH (low-energy adaptive-clustering hierarchy) and MTE (minimum transmission energy). Our results indicate that in realistic scenarios, SELAR delivers up to 12 times more data packets than LEACH and up to 1.4 times more packets than MTE. In addition, we show that the strategy of moving the sink node to avoid the rapid energy depletion of the nodes closer to the sink increases the network lifetime of SELAR up to 27 times more than LEACH and 5 times more than MTE