A Hybrid Routing Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks

With the fast development of the micro-electro- mechanical systems (MEMS), wireless sensor networks (WSN) have been extensively studied. Most of the studies focused on saving energy because of restricted energy supply in the WSN. Cluster-based routing is commonly considered as one of the most energy-efficient approaches. However, it is not always so efficient especially when there are a small number of sensor nodes distributed sparsely in the network. In this paper, we propose a hybrid routing scheme (HRS) combining cluster- based routing with flat routing for WSN. Cluster-based routing is used in dense network. And flat routing is used when the network is sparse. Simulation results show that our HRS is more efficient than existing HEED in prolonging the network lifetime.