PARC: Power aware routing and clustering scheme for wireless sensor networks

In wireless sensor networks constructed from battery driven nodes, it is difficult to supply electric power to the nodes. Because of this, the power consumption must be reduced. To cope with this problem, clustering techniques have been proposed. EACLE is a method that uses a clustering technique. In EACLE, the route selection is executed independently after the CH (Cluster Head) selection. These two phase controls increase overheads and reduce the battery power, which leads to shorten the lifetime of wireless sensor networks. This paper proposes a novel routing and clustering method called PARC for wireless sensor networks that reduces these overheads by integrating the cluster selection phase and the route construction phase into a single phase. However, PARC has a following weak point that the batteries of CHs around the sink node are depleted earlier than the other nodes and the sink node cannot collect sensing data. This phenomenon is called a hot spot problem. In order to cope with this problem of PARC, we propose PARC+, which extends the CH selection method of PARC such as more nodes around the sink can be selected as a CH node. We evaluate our proposed methods by simulation experiments and show its effectiveness.