INVESTIGATION AND SIMULATION OF ENERGY-SAVING METHODS FOR WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS

The expeditious advances in the field of networking and communication technologies, have made wireless sensor networks (WSNs) a very important technology of recent times. The range of applications in which WSN is used has only broadened over the years. Since the sensor nodes are battery operated and they are generally deployed in a harsh environment, therefore replenishment or replacement of sensor nodes is almost impossible. Hence design of energy efficient techniques has remained as the most important challenge for researchers. A sensor node consumes maximum energy in communication i.e. transmission/reception. Many researchers proposed energy efficient clustering and routing algorithm and neglected the aspect of energy balancing. Therefore, clustering and routing protocols designed for WSNs should be energy efficient as well as energy balanced for long run of WSNs. By observing the drawbacks of existing techniques, in this research work effective solutions for the existing clustering and routing problems were developed. Key Words: Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), Energy-efficient techniques, Clustering algorithm, Routing protocol, Load balancing.