A New Cooperative Balancing Routing (CBR) Protocol to Enhance the Lifetime of Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have received significant interest in the research community because they can be embedded as a communication infrastructure in several applications. However, WSNs are energy sensitive. The critical issue in these networks is how to reduce the energy consumption and accordingly prevent network partitioning. Load balancing is a proposed solution to decrease the energy consumption during data exchange, which extends the network lifetime by distributing the data routing penalty among several nodes. In this paper a new load balancing routing protocol for WSNs has been proposed, which is called; Cooperative Balancing Routing Protocol (CBR). CBR looks forward across the elected paths, then chooses the path that minimizes the consumed energy taking into account the residual energy of the nodes. Accordingly, nodes have the ability to take accurate decisions to balance energy consumption during the routing process, which in turn prolongs the network lifetime and minimizes network partitioning. A simulation is presented and the results are compared with three related routing protocols are EAR, CLB and DGLP, the experimental results show that the CBR protocol increases the lifetime of WSNs by 37, 23 and 29% over that of EAR,CLB-routing and DGLP respectively.