A Scale Adaptive Hierarchical Clustered Routing Protocol for WSNs

Abstract

Due to technique advances, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are widely used in both military and civil scenarios. A vast amount of data is transmitted to the base station through resource-restrained nodes, which are powered by batteries with limited energy. An energy saving routing protocol is fundamental for network lifetime prolongation. In this paper, we propose TECH (Tree-based Energy-balance Clustering Hierarchy), a scale adaptive hierarchical clustered routing protocol for WSNs. TECH starts the topology construction process from the base station to the far nodes, and then balance the load using the cluster heads within the same level. The in-cluster dynamic data gathering method is used for preventing the cluster heads from dying quickly and reducing the redundant data from transmission. We finally conduct extensive experiments by simulations to evaluate the performance of the proposed protocol. The simulation results show that the proposed protocol outperforms existing protocol in network lifetime prolongation. Furthermore, the protocol can be used in both small and large scale networks, and its performance is stable.