ABSTRACT

<span>Wireless sensor networks comprise of a large number of lightweight and relatively low-cost computational nodes which their main task is to sense the surrounding environment and collect the information to send it wirelessly to a central point to take the appropriate actions. Although these networks had been used in various applications, achieving this task is challenging due to the many constraints of sensor nodes including their limited processing power, communication bandwidth, and power supply. Therefore, an energy efficient routing protocols had to be developed specifically for sensor networks to insure longer lifetime and reasonable performance of the network. In this work, we propose an energy efficient hierarchical routing protocol using chain-based clustering. <span>By simulation on MATLAB, the proposed protocol proved to enhance the performance as it prolongs the lifetime of the network and decreases the energy consumption, the transmission delay, and the overhead compared to other existing protocols as it depends on some advanced methods including dynamic selection of number of chains method, k-means clustering method, advanced greedy chain construction method, and multi-factor based leader selection method.</span></span>

<span>As the applications of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) became widely used throughout the years the importance of advanced sensor networks techniques increased as well. One of the main techniques used in WSNs is hierarchical routing which mainly aims to reduce the consumption of sensor nodes energy by assigning different roles to the sensor nodes to create multi-layer scheme for data transmission. This paper embraces a simulation for two known hierarchical routing protocols: Power-Efficient Gathering in Sensor Information Systems (PEGASIS) protocol and an Improved Energy-Efficient PEGASIS-Based (IEEPB) protocol. Both protocols aim to reduce the transmission distance in order to save the nodes energy by performing chain-based clustering. For evaluation, we measured the residual energy and control overhead throughout the network operation time and the results showed major flaws in both protocols such as long link problem and poor leader selection method in PEGASIS. Moreover, high nodes density problem in IEEPB.</span>