Clustering-Based Expanding-Ring Routing Protocol Applied in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) consists of hundreds of thousands of energy-limited sensor nodes that are densely deployed in a large geographical region. Once deployed, the replacement of the energy source of these sensor nodes is usually not feasible. Hence, energy efficiency is always a key design issue that needs to be enhanced in the WSNs to improve the life span of the entire network. Although each layer of the open system interconnect (OSI) reference model should be considered when exploiting the energy constrains in the WSN, in this paper we propose a routing protocol which focuses on the network layer, called clustering-based expanding-ring routing protocol (CBERRP). CBERRP is centralized controlled by the base station (BS) and utilizes the structure of not only clusters but also chains in the WSN to route and forward the sensed data to the BS. The performance of CBERRP is compared to analogous clustering-based schemes such as low-energy adaptive clustering hierarchy (LEACH) and LEACH-centralized (LEACH-C). Simulation results show that CBERRP presents a significant improvement over these two algorithms on the performance of overall energy consumption and the network lifetime by around 50% and 100%, respectively