Energy-Efficient Protocol for Extending Battery Life in Wireless Sensor Networks

Although wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are becoming ubiquitous, the large amount of power consumed by wireless communications in transmitting sensing data from sensors to base stations or between sensor nodes themselves has become a critical problem. Since most sensor nodes are powered by batteries, we need to be more energy efficient to improve our ability to maintain them. As it is well-known that long communication distances between sensor nodes and base stations make WSNs consume more power as well as large amounts of sensing data, we propose a new energy-efficient wireless communication protocol called threshold controlled hierarchical routing (TCHR) to reduce the cost of wireless communication by reducing the communication distance in WSNs which the topology is considered closer to reality. We simulated our proposed protocol, and the simulation results demonstrated that the life of a WSN could be extended approximately 6 times longer than that with the direct data transmission protocol.