A Hierarchical Routing Protocol for Energy Load Balancing in Wireless Sensor Networks

In this paper, a hierarchical routing protocol for wireless sensor networks is introduced that aims at reducing the energy imbalance among sensor nodes by integrating the distance of the nodes from the base station into clustering policies. Moreover, the proposed routing protocol does not need any centralized support from a certain node which is at odds with aiming to establish a scalable routing protocol. Mobility management is a salient feature of this protocol that guarantees reliable communications between mobile and static nodes. A simulator was developed in the MATLAB environment to evaluate the performance of this protocol. Simulations on two different network configurations are used to validate our analysis of the proposed protocol.