Energy-Efficient Routing Protocol for Network Life Enhancement in Wireless Sensor Networks

Background: The Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is composed of autonomous nodes consist of sensors to collect the status of the surrounding environment. These nodes are equipped with limited batteries. One cannot recharge or replace the batteries of the nodes during the mission, as the applications of WSNs include in underwater, forest driven and mountain based. Objective: Thus available energy must be utilized effectively. Energy efficient routing is one of the primary sources of energy management. Cluster-based routing in WSN is a prevalent method to achieve network performance and energy efficiency. In literature, the number of cluster-based energy efficient routing protocols and their route selection metric is designed based on the residual status of node energy. However, this metric causes some of the intermediate nodes to drain energy instantly. In wireless networks this situation roots intermediate nodes to turn into a bottleneck node, and thereby performance degradation in terms of efficiency and packet delivery caused. Methods: Thus our paper aims to design a cluster based routing protocol to prevent the creation of intermediate bottleneck node. We introduce a novel routing metric called “ranking status” for the bottleneck problem. Results: Performances results indicate that the proposed routing protocol prevents the creation of intermediate bottleneck node, and improve the network's performance.