A Novel Cluster Head Selection Algorithm for Energy-Efficient Routing in Wireless Sensor Network

Wireless sensor networks consist of low power lightweight sensor nodes that are often placed remotely for applications like wildlife monitoring, rainforest monitoring, military surveillance, forest fire detection etc. Here energy is a critical issue as nodes cannot be recharged and/or replaced frequently. In this paper we propose an energy efficient hierarchical routing protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks to increase network lifetime. Here the cluster head is selected based on the residual energy, distance of the node from the base station, how recently the node was selected as cluster-head etc. Along with this, the proposed solution can also detect malicious nodes in the network and can prevent them from becoming cluster heads. The simulation results show that proposed solution provides good performance in terms of extending network lifetime, uniform selection of nodes as cluster head that eliminates the probability of a single node from draining away its power by its repetitive selection as a cluster head.