A new energy-efficient routing protocol based on clusters for wireless sensor networks

Recently, Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) has been broadly studied in ubiquitous computing environments. In WSN, it is important to reduce communication overhead by using an energy-efficient routing protocol because the resources of the sensor node are limited. Although there exist some cluster-based routing protocols, they have some problems. First, the random selection of a cluster head incurs a node concentration problem. Secondly, they have a low reliability for data communication due to the less consideration of node communication range. To solve these problems, we, in this paper, propose a new energy-efficient cluster-based routing protocol. To resolve the node concentration problem, we design a new cluster head selection algorithm based on node connectivity and devise cluster maintenance algorithms. Moreover, to guarantee data communication reliability, we use message success rate, which is one of popular measures for data communication reliability, in order to select a routing path. Through our performance analysis, we show that our protocol outperforms existing schemes in terms of communication reliability and energy efficiency.