Adaptive multi-hop routing for wireless sensor networks

A large portion of energy-aware routing protocol for wireless sensor networks are cluster-based. In cluster based approach, energy at the cluster head nodes are drained more rapidly compared to other member nodes. Dynamically change cluster heads periodically could partialy mitigate this problem, but clusters that are far from base station still suffer from large amount of energy for directly transmit their cluster data back to base station. Multi-hop routing was introduced to reduce energy dissipation of cluster heads that far away from base station by relaying data through nearer cluster heads. However it may overload cluster heads that are near the base station. In this paper, we propose an adaptive multi-hop hierarchical routing approach where member nodes in cluster may send their data, based on distance information, to cluster head or to base station directly to reduce energy dissipation of cluster heads. This decision is independent at each node which makes this approach highly distributed. Simulation results show that the proposed routing protocol has longer node lifetime than the original LEACH and M-LEACH protocol.