Improving routing in sensor networks with heterogeneous sensor nodes

Existing routing protocols mainly consider homogeneous sensor networks where all sensor nodes are the same. However, a homogeneous ad hoc network suffers from poor performance limit and scalability. Recent research has demonstrated its performance bottleneck both theoretically and through experiments. Furthermore, recently deployed sensor network systems are increasingly following heterogeneous designs, incorporating a mixture of sensors with widely varying capabilities. To improve network performance, we propose to form heterogeneous sensor networks by deploying a small number of powerful high-end sensors in addition to a large number of low-end sensors. We design an efficient cluster head relay (CHR) routing protocol for heterogeneous sensor networks. Our simulation experiments demonstrate that CHR performs better than two popular sensor network routing protocols.