A Node Sleeping Algorithm for WSNs Based on the Minimum Hop Routing Protocol

Designing an energy efficient algorithm is one of the most important challenges in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). In this paper, we present a node sleeping algorithm based on the minimum hop routing protocol to minimize energy consumption. The proposed scheme divides all the nodes except the sink node into terminal nodes and intermediate nodes according to their different functions. Terminal nodes only collect data while intermediate nodes not only collect data but also forward them. Accordingly, our scheme adopts different sleep and wake-up strategies to the two types of nodes. To evaluate its performance, we compare it with the scheme in which nodes do not sleep, in terms of network lifetime, average remaining energy and packet delivery ratio. Simulation results show that our proposed node sleeping algorithm can reduce the energy consumption and extend the network lifetime.