Geographic Routing in Clustered Wireless Sensor Networks Among Obstacles

An important issue of research in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is to dynamically organize the sensors into a wireless network and route the sensory data from sensors to a sink. Clustering in WSNs is an effective technique for prolonging the network lifetime. In most of the traditional routing in clustered WSNs assumes that there is no obstacle in a field of interest. Although it is not a realistic assumption, it eliminates the effects of obstacles in routing the sensory data. In this paper, we first propose a clustering technique in WSNs named energy-efficient homogeneous clustering that periodically selects the cluster heads according to a hybrid of their residual energy and a secondary parameter, such as the utility of the sensor to its neighbors. In this way, the selected cluster heads have equal number of neighbors and residual energy. We then present a route optimization technique in clustered WSNs among obstacles using Dijkstra´s shortest path algorithm. We demonstrate that our work reduces the average hop count, packet delay, and energy-consumption of WSNs.