Energy Aware Cluster Based Multi-hop Energy Efficient Routing Protocol using Multiple Mobile Nodes (MEACBM) in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Routing in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) is the most significant and the challenging issue for the researchers in terms of enhancing its performance in terms of network lifetime, energy efficiency, scalability, connectivity, throughput, etc. They have the incredible capability to interact and gather data from any physical environment with help of routing protocols. Many routing protocols based solutions have been proposed in the recent years for accomplishing the preferred level of performance in WSNs for these issues. The hierarchical heterogeneous cluster based energy efficient routing protocols are more efficient as compared to flat and location based routing protocols due to the presence of nodes heterogeneity in terms of energy level of sensor nodes which enhances the lifetime of the network. The most recent trend that extensively enhances the functionality and the performance of WSNs is the use of mobile sensor nodes. In this paper, the authors proposed a novel concept regarding mobile sensor nodes is proposed called Mobile Energy Aware Cluster Based Multi-hop (MEACBM) routing protocol for hierarchical heterogeneous WSNs which selects CHs on the basis of newly proposed probability equation which selects only that sensor node as Cluster Head (CH) which has the highest energy among other sensor nodes by introducing a new term S(i).E in the equation. It considers hierarchical heterogeneous clustering considering three levels of sensor nodes; multi-hoping for inter-cluster communication and connectivity of sensor nodes within the whole network area. In MEACBM, after the deployment of sensor nodes and formation of clusters, the whole network area is divided into sectors and inside each sector a mobile sensor node is placed which act as Mobile Data Collector (MDC) for collecting data from CHs. This technique helps in significantly reducing the energy consumption of sensor nodes for transferring information to the Base Station (BS). Simulation performance based results indicates the effectiveness of MEACBM routing protocols by comparing it with other contemporary cluster based routing protocols in terms of network lifetime, stability, throughput, number of CHs and number of dead nodes.