A Distributed and Effective Cluster Routing Protocol of Sensor Networks

Routing protocol is very important in wireless sensor networks (WSNs), which decides the network organization and the route for data transmitting. As many routing protocols have been proposed, they can be divided into hierarchical routing, location-based routing and on-demand routing protocol. Hierarchical routing protocols such as LEACH, PEGASIS can only be used in small scale network; location-based routing protocols are restricted by the geographical information and the nodes must contain GPS equipment; on-demand routing protocols such as AODV can be used in large scale WSNs, but they bring control messages and long delay. This paper proposes a new routing protocol named DECROP (distributed and effective cluster routing protocol). It has following characteristics: It is simple but efficient. It only has a few control messages with high reliability. It also takes clustering and low energy consumption into consideration. DECROP has three processes: initialization, distributed cluster forming, data transmitting and route maintenance. We compare DECROP with AODV, and simulation results indicate that DECROP has fewer control messages, shorter end-to-end delay in the application of transmitting data to base station (BS) and the residual energy is close to AODV. DECROP is especially suitable for large scale WSNs with homogenous sensors.