LEMH: Low-Energy-First Electoral Multipath Alternating Multihop Routing Algorithm for Wireless Sensor Networks

Lifetime is a vital performance metric for wireless sensor networks (WSNs), with current hierarchical routing protocols suffering from the premature death of overloaded nodes, affecting the network’s lifetime. Spurred by this problem, we propose a low-energy first electoral multipath alternating multihop (LEMH) routing scheme. To avoid overloading the nodes, these are given a contention radius that adaptively changes with the topology and affords the nodes to combine the remaining energy to vote for those participating in the cluster heads election process. Then, the running nodes decide the final cluster head based on two-dimensional competition parameters. Finally, the traditional multihop communication shortcomings are addressed by formulating an energy balance lifetime maximization routing problem based on sequential quadratic programming (SQP) under alternating multihop. This problem is optimally solved using particle swarm optimization (PSO), providing an improved multihop transmission scheme for WSNs. The simulation results demonstrate that LEMH effectively extends the network’s survival time and improves performance.