Performance evaluation of new energy aware cluster based multi-hop (EACBM) routing protocol in wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have turn out to be an integral part of our lives as they are used in every part of applications varying from disaster management to medical sciences. In such applications, network lifetime and energy efficiency have become the important requirements of WSNs. Hierarchical cluster based routing is mostly used to take care of these issues where sensor nodes are organized to form clusters and a particular sensor node is selected inside each cluster for inter and intra-cluster communication. In this paper, new hierarchical cluster based energy efficient routing protocol i.e. Energy Aware Cluster Based Multi-hop (EACBM) is proposed which uses new probabilistic equation along with the concept of clustering and multi-hoping. Here multi-hoping is used for inter-cluster communication for transferring information from Cluster Head (CH) and Base Station (BS) via number of hops if CH lies far away from BS. This results in reducing the number of transmission, due to which network lifetime and energy efficiency is increased. The concept of sub-clustering is also used here to cover those sensor nodes which are deployed far away during their random distribution phase as those far way sensor nodes may gather information which may be very crucial for applications such as military application. Simulation results shows that EACBM routing protocol performs better when compared with other cluster based energy efficient routing protocols (LEACH, SEP, CEEC and LEFCA) in terms of network lifetime, packets transmitted to BS, number of CHs, stability period and number of dead sensor nodes per round.