A battery aware distributed clustering and routing protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

The objective of improving energy efficiency in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) is a primary design requirement given the limited energy available in the battery powered sensor nodes. In this paper, a battery aware distributed clustering and routing protocol is proposed for the maximization of the network lifetime. The proposed protocol incorporates the state of the battery's remaining charge and health parameters in computing the charge utility metric at each cluster formation round. The performance of the proposed protocol is assessed via analysis and simulations and the gains are quantified using common energy related metrics. The numerical results demonstrate that the proposed approach is able to effectively increase the network lifetime significantly when compared to other distributed flat and hierarchical based routing protocols. The implication of the findings is that, by carefully harnessing the information pertaining to the nodes' battery condition at the network layer, it is feasible to realize major improvements in energy efficiency of the WSN.