Alleviating the Domino Effect in Wireless Sensor Networks

In hierarchical-based routing in sensor networks, the concept of Cluster-Heads (CHs) is used to reduce routing complexity and improve performance. This happens as non-CH members send their sensed data to the CH, which then sends the aggregated signal to the BS either directly or by collaborating with other CHs. However, in this type of routing, the death of one CH during a round causes virtual death of all the nodes in its cluster. This cascades into other clusters and induces a series of identical effects, causing intensive virtual death of nodes which eventually leads to inefficient utilization of energy. We refer to this problem as the “Domino-Effect”, and propose a centralized energy-aware routing protocol, called Domino effect-Evasive Energy-efficient Hierarchical Routing Protocol (DEEHRP) to explicitly reduce this effect. DEEHRP is an extension to the Energy-efficient Hierarchical Routing Protocol (EHRP). Extensive simulation results confirm that DEEHRP outperforms the well-known Base-station Controlled Dynamic Clustering Protocol (BCDCP). In particular, it reduces energy consumption by up to 36% as compared to BCDCP. Furthermore, results show that DEEHRP succeeds in alleviating the domino-effect problem and curtailing its effect by up to 25.5% and 10.3%, over BCDCP and EHRP, respectively.