Position-Based Scheme for Multi-Hop Routing Protocol in Cluster-Based Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) are commonly formed by distributed sensor nodes equipped with wireless transmitter with limited bandwidth, computation power and battery sources. WSN are generally developed for wild life, military or environmental monitoring etc. These facts have highlighted challenges to minimize energy consumption of sensor nodes while still maintaining the goal of WSN developments. In this paper, an integration of cluster-based and position based routing protocols for multi-hop scenarios is proposed. The self-organized clusters are formed periodically where decision to become cluster head (CH) is performed individually by each node. Direct long communication between selected CH to sink node is avoided to preserve energy and minimize impact of overhearing transmission. Accordingly, a multi-hop communication scheme which adopts position based routing is applied. The proposed approach has been developed and tested using wireless simulation framework. It shows that the proposed approach can increase remaining battery energy, increase packet delivery ratio and reduce the number of dead nodes in various simulation settings.