Hilbert-Chain Topology for Energy Conservation in Large-Scale Wireless Sensor Networks

This paper addresses the efficient consumption of wireless sensor nodes' battery energy for sensor data collection in a large-scale wireless sensor network. In a large scale deployment of sensor nodes, nodes require a significant fraction of battery energy for establishing and maintaining sensory data routing path from each node to a base station or sink node. In order to reduce the energy dissipation of nodes and thus prolong the lifetime of network, the study proposes an energy-efficient routing protocol, which combines a grid clustering strategy, a intra-cluster tree-based data collection, and a novel Hilbert chain over the cluster heads to reduce data transmission distance and to relax a lot of burden on topology control during the lifespan of the network. By computer simulation, the proposed protocol was shown to have better performance than other similar protocols in term of energy saving and network life time under the random deployment of nodes in wireless sensor networks.