ERNC: An energy-balanced routing protocol based on network coordinate for wireless sensor networks

As one of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) routing protocols, the geographic location-aware routing protocol has two following problems. Firstly, it always depends on GPS to get the geographic location information of nodes which incurs too expensive implementation cost to be widely used. Secondly, its data-gathering scheme is not energy-balanced which leads to some relay/forward nodes to be offline quickly due to their exhaustion. Especially, the network connectivity is influenced tremendously because the energy of hotspots consume too fast, which results in the decrease of network time. In this paper, we first use network coordinate (NC) to obtain relative location information between nodes, which is the prerequisite for implementing our scheme. A new data-gathering ring scheme is proposed to select the optimal neighbor candidate nodes set. Then, we present an energy-balanced method, which takes a comprehensive consideration of location and energy information, to select an optimal node in neighbor candidate nodes set as the next hop. Simulation results show that the network lifetime is prolonged 47 percentages, the total number of packets received by upper layer is more than 33 percentages compared with Leach and the network connectivity of our protocol is much better than that of Leach.