An Energy-Aware Clustering Approach for Wireless Sensor Networks

Energy conservation is an essential and critical requirement for a wireless sensor network with battery operated nodes intended for long term operations. Prior work has described different approaches to routing protocol designs that achieve energy efficiency in a wireless sensor network. Several of these works involve variations of mote-to-mote routing (flat routing) while some make use of leader nodes in clusters to perform routing (hierarchical routing). A key question then arises as to how the performance of an energy-aware, flat routing protocol compare with that of one based on hierarchical routing. This paper demonstrates a hierarchical routing protocol design that can conserve significant energy in its setup phase as well as during its steady state data dissemination phase. This paper describes the design of this protocol and evaluates its performance against existing energy-aware flat routing protocols. Simulation results show that it exhibits competitive performance against the flat routing protocols.