An energy efficient routing mechanism for wireless sensor networks

Abstract

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in wireless sensor networks. One of the major issues in wireless sensor network is developing an energy-efficient routing protocol. Since the sensor nodes have limited available power, energy conservation is a critical issue in wireless sensor network for nodes and network life. Most of the existing routing protocols for sensor networks don't turn off the radio frequency completely. They speed up the energy consumption. LEACH (low energy adaptive clustering hierarchy) is a clustering-based protocol that non-cluster-head nodes will turn off their RF completely until their pre-allocated time slot. However, LEACH has a drawback that the cluster is not evenly distributed due to its randomized rotation of local cluster-head. In this paper, we propose a MECH (maximum energy cluster head) routing protocol. It has self-configuration and hierarchical tree routing properties. MECH improves LEACH in several aspects. MECH constructs clusters based on radio range and the number of cluster members. The cluster topology in the network is distributed more equally, through our cluster constructing. We also propose a hierarchical tree routing method that reduces the distance of cluster-head to the base station.