Energy efficient routing for improving lifetime in MWSN: A clustering approach

A Mobile wireless sensor network (MWSN) consists of mobile sensor nodes, which can be deployed in any specific environment, and due to its’ mobility it can perform with rapid topological transformations of a network. The sensor nodes having limited battery power are used to collect specific data and this raw data is sent to a static sink node of the network. Under such a scenario, to avoid frequent disconnections due to topological change in the network and can avail more reliable data transmissions in energy awareness perspective, an energy efficient routing protocol for MWSNs to improve its lifetime is proposed here by utilizing a clustering approach. A MWSN with random number of sensor nodes are initially considered and then, clustering algorithm K-means is used to determine a predefined number of clusters with their initial cluster heads (CHs) and centroid locations of these clusters is also determined. The role of these CHs is to elect our DDBLACH (distance to sink and cluster centroid with battery level aware cluster head) nodes from each cluster, by sending and receiving intra-cluster messages among other member sensor nodes. A DDBLACH node is determined by using three factors, such as minimum distance from cluster centroid location, minimum distance from sink and the maximum battery level of the node from each cluster. These DDBLACH nodes are used to collect data from intra-cluster sensors and thereafter, send those towards sink node for further processing using tree-based hierarchical routes. Finally, an energy efficient routing technique for MWSNs is proposed for data transmission from DDBLACH nodes of clusters to sink of the network. Simulation results indicate the superiority of our proposed scheme over other existing methods in various aspects, such as improving more data packet transmission by 14%-23%, presence of alive nodes and subsequently average network lifetime by 5%-24%.