Owing to the limited energy of sensor nodes (SNs) in a wireless sensor network (WSN), it is important to reduce and balance the energy consumption of the SNs in order to extend the WSN lifetime. Clustering mechanism is a highly efficient and effective mechanism for minimizing the amount of energy that SNs consume during the transmission of data packets. In this paper, an election energy threshold based multi-hop routing protocol (mEEMRP) is presented. In order to minimize energy consumption, this routing protocol uses grid clustering, where the network field is divided into grid clusters. SNs in each grid cluster select a cluster head (CH) based on a weight factor that takes the node location, node’s residual energy (RE) as well as the node’s distance from the base station into consideration. An energy efficient multi-hop routing algorithm is adopted during the transmission of data packets from the cluster heads (CHs) to the base station (BS). This multi-hop routing algorithm uses an election energy threshold value, T­nhCH that takes into consideration the RE of CHs as well as the distance between CHs. Simulation results show a 1.77% and 10.65% improvement in terms of network lifetime for two network field scenarios over Energy Efficient Multi-hop Routing Protocol (EEMRP).

Energy efficient routing protocols in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) is an important area of research due to energy limitations. It is therefore important to maximize the limited energy so as to increase the network lifetime of the WSN. In this paper, a modified energy efficient multi-hop routing protocol (mEEMRP) in a 200 m 2 field is presented. This protocol is based on a technique that involves balancing load between communication management (CM) nodes during the multi-hop routing of aggregated data to the base station (BS), where the residual energy (RE) levels of CM nodes are considered as well as the distance between neighboring CM nodes. Simulation results showed that mEEMRP yielded a 1.77% improvement over energy efficient multi-hop routing protocol (EEMRP) in terms of network lifetime. More so, the proposed mEEMRP also improved the energy consumption and the number of packets received at the BS by 4.83% and 7.41%, respectively.