A Method for Constructing Multi-Hop Routing Tree among Cluster Heads in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

In traditional routing protocols including LEACH for wireless sensor networks, nodes suffer from unbalanced energy consumption because the nodes require large transmission energy as the distance to the sink node increase. Multi-hop based routing protocols have been studied to address this problem. In existing protocols, each cluster head usually chooses the closest head as a relay node. We propose LEACH-CHT, in which cluster heads choose the path with least energy consumption to send data to the sink node. In our research, each hop, a cluster head selects the least cost path to the sink node. This method solves the looping problem efficiently as well as make it possible that a cluster head excludes other cluster heads placed farther than its location from the path, without additional energy consumption. By balancing the energy consumption among the nodes, our proposed scheme outperforms existing multi-hop schemes by up to 36% in terms of average network lifetime.