A grid-based energy efficient routing protocol in Wireless Sensor Networks

Due to limited energy of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), routing plays a crucial role in improving energy efficiency. The low-energy adaptive clustering hierarchy (LEACH) protocol is a classical solution to cut down energy cost, but it neglects residual energy of sensor nodes and long-range communication which causes low network coverage and high energy consumption. To avoid these shortcomings, we put forward a grid-based energy efficient routing protocol (GEERP) which focuses on three improvements: energy consumption, energy efficiency and network coverage. In GEERP, WSNs are divided into two levels: one is called secondary level grid (SG), which is formed by one cluster head (CH) and several cluster members (CMs); the other one is premier level grid (PG), which consists of nine adjacent SGs. In each round, CH is selected based on residual energy level of sensor nodes in a cluster. Then fused data of CH will be transmitted to sink node through multi-hop routing which is determined by minimum weight. Simulation results demonstrate that GEERP can not only balance network energy consumption of network but also can highly improve the network coverage.