An energy-efficient routing protocol for wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks are generally deployed in inhospitable terrain where the lightweight nodes are expected to detect an event and send relevant data to the Base Station (BS). However in such remote places it is generally not feasible to replace batteries quite often. Clustering is an approach to minimize energy consumption of such network. However the approach should be flexible enough to avoid excessive battery drain of the cluster heads particularly those near the BS and to address topology changes as nodes die out. So, in this paper an Energy Aware Sleep Scheduling Clustering based Routing scheme (EASSCR) for Wireless Sensor Network is proposed. Here some nodes are put to sleep to prolong the network lifetime. EASSCR selects a node as a cluster head if its residual energy is more than system average energy and if a node´s remaining energy reaches five percent of its initial energy then it directly sends data to BS avoiding node failure during data collection or aggregation. The goals of this scheme are, increase stability period of network, and minimize loss of sensed data. Performance analysis show that EASSCR has significant improvement over existing protocols LEACH and SEP in terms of lifetime of network and data units gathered at BS.