RLP: A Community Detection-Based Routing Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

In Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), routing remains a key issue primarily regarding to the overall energy consumption. Accordingly, the energy conservation has been addressed by a few strategies, namely cluster-based hierarchical routing protocols. Nevertheless, the load balancing and the network lifetime achieved by such strategies strongly depend on the even distribution of the cluster-heads in the network. Therefore, we propose in this paper a community detection-based routing protocol for automatically producing and evenly distributing clusters in the network. We evaluate the performance of the proposed protocol and compare it with LEACH by considering the connectivity of the sensor nodes to the cluster-heads, the routing efficiency, the event data delivery ratio and the network lifetime. According to the results, the proposed approach outperform LEACH when considering applications with strict response times.