An Energy-Balanced Mechanism for Hierarchical Routing in Wireless Sensor Networks

In wireless sensor networks (WSNs), energy-constrained sensor nodes are always deployed in hazardous and inaccessible environments, making energy management a key problem for network design. The mechanism of RNTA (redundant node transmission agents) lacks an updating mechanism for the redundant nodes, causing an unbalanced energy distribution among sensor nodes. This paper presents an energy-balanced mechanism for hierarchical routing (EBM-HR), in which the residual energy of redundant nodes is quantified and made hierarchic, so that the cluster head can dynamically select the redundant node with the highest residual energy grade as a relay to complete the information transmission to the sink node and achieve an intracluster energy balance. In addition, the network is divided into several layers according to the distances between cluster heads and the sink node. Based on the energy consumption of the cluster heads, the sink node will decide to recluster only in a certain layer so as to achieve an intercluster energy balance. Our approach is evaluated by a simulation comparing the LEACH algorithm to the HEED algorithm. The results demonstrate that the BEM-HR mechanism can significantly boost the performance of a network in terms of network lifetime, data transmission quality, and energy balance.