Energy efficient delay-aware routing in multi-tier architecture for wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor network (WSN) is composed of a large number of sensor nodes densely deployed in inhospitable physical environments. Due to limitations of sensor nodes in terms of memory, energy and computational capacities, the most important issue for designing sensor network protocols is energy efficiency. Although energy efficiency is a major concern in WSNs, it often suffers from the addition network delay. In this work, we first propose an energy and delay efficient hierarchical clustering scheme called BHC (Bruijn Hierarchical Clustering) for WSNs. It allows data transmission from sensor nodes to the base station (BS) in the form of multi-hop, multi-path and ensure energy efficiency and reasonable delay. Next, we provide data distribution algorithms from the sensor nodes to BS as quickly as possible and the most energy efficient. To evaluate the appropriateness of our proposal, we analyze the simulation results against another protocol in terms of communication overhead, total amount of energy dissipated in system and network delay using ns-2 network simulator.