Certain investigations for improving clustering and routing techniques to enhance the lifetime of wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is one amongst the prominently developing technologies in the present century. WSN has enabled Human- Machine interaction in any environment to a greater extent. Industrial and academic sectors have turned their attention towards the rapidly developing WSN due to its boundless application to various aspects in a society. WSN consists of a large number of energy-aware sensor devices communicating through wireless channels, carrying out different tasks such as distributed sensing, processing the data and transmitting the processed data to the target. Sensor networks have been used in a wide variety of applications which include healthcare at home or assisted living, military surveillance, accurate monitoring of any natural phenomena or process, real time monitoring in the industrial applications, critical infrastructures and the list goes on. WSN consists of a large number of sensor nodes with sensing and communication capabilities which can co-operatively sense data and send them to the Sink. The aim of deploying sensor nodes is to sense the environment, process and transfer the information to an analysis center. Sensor nodes are portable devices that are powered, generally by limited and irreplaceable power sources like batteries. Sensor nodes also have very limited transmission range. Hence, parsimonious utilization of power is of paramount importance. Therefore, a network of sensor nodes is essential to propagate their data longer distance. Energy optimization in sensor nodes turns out to be the significant challenge in WSN. newline