Energy efficient cluster based routing protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks consist of hundreds of tiny, inexpensive, resource constrained sensor nodes. Routing is a challenging task in such environment mainly due to the unique constraints the wireless sensor networks suffer from. Highly dynamic topology of wireless sensor networks is another challenge due to which the existing route becomes unavailable very frequently. Energy efficiency of the protocols and algorithms being a major design goal in sensor network setup, in this paper a novel energy efficient routing protocol is proposed. The proposed protocol is hierarchical and cluster based. In this protocol, the Base Station selects the Cluster Heads (CH). The selection procedure is carried out in two stages. In the first stage, all candidate nodes for becoming CH are listed, based on the parameters like relative distance of the candidate node from the Base Station, remaining energy level, probable number of neighboring sensor nodes the candidate node can have, and the number of times the candidate node has already become the Cluster Head. The Cluster Head generates two schedules for the cluster members namely Sleep and TDMA based Transmit. The data transmission inside the cluster and from the Cluster Head to the Base Station takes place in a multi-hop fashion. The current session ends when the energy level of any one of the current Cluster Heads reduces to half of its initial energy amount. The simulation results of the proposed protocol are also reported. Future scopes of this work are outlined.