A Chain-Based Routing Protocol to Maximize the Lifetime of Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Energy conservation is a key issue in the design of systems based on wireless sensor networks. Clustering routing protocols have been developed in order to reduce the network traffic toward the sink and therefore prolong the network lifetime. An alternative of clustering is to build chains instead of clusters. In this context, we propose a routing protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN). It is based on constructing multiple chains in the direction of the sink. The first node of each chain sends data to the closest node in the same chain. This latter collects, aggregates and transmits data to the next closest node. This process repeats until reaching the last node, which aggregates and transmits data directly to the sink. An improvement of this approach is proposed. It works as follows: In addition to forming multiple chains as previously, it constructs a main chain, which includes leader node of each chain. Since, initially all main chain nodes have the same amount of power, the nearest node to the sink aggregates data from others then transmits it to the sink. In the next transmission, main chain node having the higher residual energy performs this task. Compared with the first approach, simulation results show that improvement approach consumes less energy and effectively extends the network lifetime.