An energy efficient cluster based routing strategy for mobile wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks should be energy efficient in order to enhance the lifetime of the network. Various phases of network operation decide on how the network energy is expended. Efficacious techniques incorporated on the network operations should be able to conserve sufficient amount of energy and preserve data integrity. Density of nodes in clustered wireless sensor networks plays a vital role in determining the amount of energy consumed by the network. Higher density of nodes accumulated to a smaller area would result in cluster head being depleted of energy quickly. Similarly lower densities may lead to wasting of unused energy. In the above cases, life-time of the wireless sensor network gets diminished alarmingly. When the wireless sensor nodes move around with random mobility, it is possible that there can be a sudden upsurge in data traffic in a particular region. The cluster-head node in these regions may be subjected to overloading of data processing. They collect data from their member nodes and forward them to other cluster-heads so that collected data can reach the base station. If cluster-heads lose energy, the data they collected may get lost and the nodes connected to them may get disconnected from the entire network. Therefore placement of cluster-heads should be efficient enough that they should have optimally dense nodes connected to them. Forwarding the collected data from nodes to the base station requires considerable amount of energy. Usually cluster head nodes route the data collected to the base station. During routing phase, it is necessary that the cluster head nodes should have optimal amount of energy to forward the available data. Hence efficient routing protocol that best suits the architecture should be used in forwarding the data to the base station in order to minimize the energy consumption thereby increasing the life-time of the network newline