AN ENERGY EFFICIENT ROUTING PROTOCOL FOR WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS

Wireless distributed microsensor systems will enable the reliable monitoring of a variety of environments for both civil and military applications. A wireless sensor network consists of nodes that can communicate with each other via wireless links. One way to support efficient communication between sensors is to organize the network into several groups, called clusters, with each cluster electing one node as the head of cluster. Energy efficiency is of great importance for the wireless sensor network (WSN). A popular way to save energy is to construct clusters for data aggregation and forwarding. In this thesis a distributed cluster algorithm is studied to improve the energy consumption efficiency. It was observed that the cluster head has to lie within the transmission range of the base station (sink node) and the distance between cluster head and base station is critical for the energy consumption performance, we proposed a pseudo-cluster and virtual hierarchical clustering scheme (PC-LEACH), which considers the power level of the non-cluster head nodes and the residual energy level during the cluster head selection stage. Consequently we could better balance the chance of being cluster head for all nodes. Simulation results show that the scheme is able to result in longer network lifetime than the well-known protocol LEACH.M.S. in Electrical Engineering, May 201