An Inter-Cluster Gateway-Based Energy-Efficient Routing Protocol

In the existing clustering protocol, cluster heads (CHs) usually transmit data to Sink directly with long-distance transmission and huge energy consumption. To solve this problem, an inter-cluster gateway-based energy-efficient routing protocol (IGER) is proposed in this paper. It makes cluster heads evenly distributed, chooses appropriate nodes to be gateways for inter-cluster communication to share CHs' energy consumption. Simulations show that IGER consumes very little energy, effectively balances energy consumption of all nodes, and prolongs the network lifetime, outperforms LEACH, PEGASIS and iHEED.