Energy Efficient Routing Protocol to Extend Wireless Sensor Network Lifetime

Abstract

In Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) the sensor nodes have limited energy resources with their mostly irreplaceable batteries. This makes to encourage design protocols that are energy efficient to provide a longer network lifetime. This paper proposes a method to divide the sensor network into equal-size grids namely regular geometric shaped clusters selecting Cluster Head (CH) and Vice Cluster Head (VCH) for each grid by using Fuzzy Logic System (FLS). Since the CH being the central node and performing additional tasks in the cluster often results in early energy drain the VCHs are introduced here as additional internal resources to replace CHs in the network. Unlike other typical hierarchical routing protocols the CHs are not changed per each round, rather they are replaced on-demand in order to reduce energy consumption. We analyze and compare our proposal in the MATLAB with the well-known cluster-based protocol LEACH and its modified version MODLEACH. The results show a significant improvement in network throughput energy consumption and network lifetime.