An Energy Efficient Routing Scheme in Wireless Sensor Networks

In wireless sensor networks, it is an important task to periodically collect data from an area of interest for time-sensitive applications. The sensed data must be gathered and transmitted to a base station for further processing to meet the end-user queries. Since the network consists of low-cost nodes with limited battery power, it is a challenging task to design an efficient routing scheme that can minimize delay and offer good performance in energy efficiency, and long network lifetimes. In this paper, we propose a two layer hierarchical routing protocol, called cluster-based minimal spanning tree with degree-constrained (CMST-DC), to collect information efficiently. CMST-DC is efficient in the ways that it ensures maximal utilization of network energy, it makes the lifetime of the network longer, as well as it takes much lower time to complete a round. Simulation results show that CMST-DC performs better than other hierarchical routing protocols, such as low-energy adaptive clustering hierarchy (LEACH) and group-based sensor network (GSEN). In addition, CMST-DC is completely self-configurable and robust for any changes in network topology.