PCAR: A Power-Aware Chessboard-Based Adaptive Routing Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Increasingly, services operations which perform data sensing and data propagation in a dynamic environment are important tasks of wireless sensor networks. A limited unreplenishable energy supply at each sensor node makes these tasks more challenging. Therefore, increasing the network lifetime is the main contribution of this investigation. In this paper, we propose a novel power-aware chessboard-based adaptive routing (PCAR) protocol to support immobility management in wireless sensor networks. The paramount design challenge in this work is to scale-down network energy consumption, thus maximizing the network lifetime. Our PCAR protocol utilizes vector-oriented propagation, power-consideration decision, and multi-path routing protocols to guide the propagating data to its destination. Moreover, properties of clusters are combined in the PCAR to form cluster-plates in a chessboard-based clustered sensor network. The alternate usage of cluster-head nodes and sleep nodes increases energy efficiency. The opportune divide-and-conquer multi-path fusion mechanism slows down and balances energy consumption. Finally, a performance analysis shows that energy efficiency is achieved by the PCAR protocol.