Efficient management of energy budget for PEGASIS routing protocol

Sensor nodes of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are usually powered by non rechargeable exhaustible batteries with limited lifetime duration. As the deployment of these WSNs operates in harsh environments, generally inaccessible and sometimes hostile, the replacement of depleted batteries is not feasible or cumbersome because of the huge number of nodes. Therefore, sensor nodes have to ensure their mission with their unique strict initial energy budget. This constraint makes the scarce energy resource the most decisive and of critical importance in the WSNs. As data routing is an essential basic service in a WSN and communication in that network is the most energy consumer activity, so devising routing protocols optimizing energy consumption is actually a research area very active. In this context, we propose MH-PEGASIS: a multi hops routing protocol, minimizing the energy consumption and extending the network life time. This new protocol is a more efficient variant of the well known protocol PEGASIS. Simulations carried out in an environment of the NS2 simulator gave results outperforming those of original PEGASIS.