Energy Aware Routing Protocol in Wireless Sensor Networks

Mobile node should be fully connected with the other nodes to communicate to each others in wireless networks. Data can be propagated to the destination with various delivery methods: one-hop model, multi-hop planer model and cluster-based hierarchical model. One-hop model is the simplest delivery method and makes the link by directly communicating any two nodes. Multi-hop model with store-and-forward method delivers data by forwarding to one of its adjacent nodes that are closer to the destination. In cluster model, mobile nodes have been grouped into a cluster. It has benefits of delivery latency and route management. In this paper, we propose energy-aware routing protocol to reduce the energy consumption of wireless sensor networks using the combination of tree-based minimum transmission energy routing and cluster-based hierarchical routing. In our technique, the highest energy node within h hops becomes a cluster-head. Therefore the size of every cluster is less than and/or equal to h hops. Every node can have different energy level the same as real environment and transmits its data to its cluster-head with short distance tree algorithm. Cluster-head sends data to the other cluster-head or the sink with tree-based minimum transmission energy algorithm due to the limit of nodes' transmission range. We perform simulations to compare its performance with that of conventional routing protocol such as direct and minimum transmission energy, and various energy levels. From simulation results, we confirm that the proposed routing strategy offers better performance.