An Efficient Centroid-Based Routing Protocol for Energy Management in WSN-Assisted IoT

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) distribute hundreds to thousands of inexpensive micro sensor nodes in their regions, and these nodes are important parts of Internet of Things (IoT). In WSN-assisted IoT, the nodes are resource constrained in many ways, such as storage resources, computing resources, energy resources, and so on. Robust routing protocols are required to maintain a long network lifetime and achieve higher energy utilization. In this paper, we propose a new energy-efficient centroidbased routing protocol (EECRP) for WSN-assisted IoT to improve the performance of the network. The proposed EECRP includes three key parts: a new distributed cluster formation technique that enables the self-organization of local nodes, a new series of algorithms for adapting clusters and rotating the cluster head based on the centroid position to evenly distribute the energy load among all sensor nodes, and a new mechanism to reduce the energy consumption for long-distance communications. In particular, the residual energy of nodes is considered in EECRP for calculating the centroid's position. Our simulation results indicate that EECRP performs better than LEACH, LEACH-C, and GEEC. In addition, EECRP is suitable for networks that require a long lifetime and whose base station (BS) is located in the network.