Energy-Efficient Intra-Cluster Routing Algorithm to Enhance the Coverage Time of Wireless Sensor Networks

Due to limited power supplies, the sensor nodes exhaust their energy eventually. Accordingly, data transmission mechanisms between nodes and their destinations need to be designed based on energy efficiency. Most of the existing cluster-based schemes adopt direct data transmission manner for intra-cluster communication, which leads to the unbalanced energy consumption of member nodes (MNs) and results in coverage holes in the network. Several mobile sink (MS)-based schemes focus exclusively on optimizing the sojourn locations of the MS to balance the energy consumption among sensor nodes. However, in most of them, the MS stays at only one location within a cluster which leads to the unbalanced energy consumption of MNs. Furthermore, the time limitation for balancing the energy consumption of nodes has not been considered in the previous schemes, which results in reduced network performance. In this paper, the Energy-Efficient Intra-cluster Routing (EIR) algorithm is proposed to balance the energy consumption of MNs during a limited time, which leads to enhancing the coverage time of the network. In the proposed scheme, upon arriving the MS to a cluster, the optimal sojourn locations are determined with respect to allocated sojourn time to the cluster in such a way that moving the MS along these locations leads to balancing energy consumption among MNs. Based on the simulation results, the EIR algorithm remarkably increases the network performance in terms of different performance evaluation metrics.