A Hierarchical Power-Efficient Routing Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are used for various applications such as habitat monitoring, agriculture, automation and military. Since numerous sensors are usually deployed in remote and inaccessible places, it is not feasible to replace equipped batteries with limited power capacity. Therefore, it is essential that the network could be energy-efficient in order to maximize the lifetime of the whole network. Many energy efficient protocols are proposed. Among these protocols, LEACH (Low Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy) protocol and PEGASIS (Power-Efficient Gathering in Sensor Information Systems) are the most popular two. In this paper, we propose a novel power-efficient hierarchy cluster-based routing protocol (PEHC) for continuous stream queries in wireless sensor networks. The PEHC is a cluster-based architecture and uses a centre-node set to manage each cluster. Higherlevel clusters are only used for inter-cluster communication between cluster heads and the base station in order to minimize transmission energy. Simulation results, compared with LEACH and PEGASIS, demonstrate that our novel routing protocol can reduce energy consumption and hence prolong the lifetime of WSNs.