Extending lifetime of heterogenous wireless sensor network using relay node selection

Extending network lifetime is an ultimate goal in designing a wireless sensor network. For that reason, clustering mechanism has been applied to sensor networks with hierarchical structure to increase network performance while reducing energy consumption needed. The energy consumption for a single-hop data transmission is definitely high for far away sink node location. As a solution, relay node can be used to take advantage of the additional energy saving through multi-hop transmission. In this paper a three-layered architecture was proposed for randomly deployed heterogeneous wireless sensor networks. Another algorithm for relay node selection also was presented. Finally, simulation has been done to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm to improve the network lifetime.