Fire Bloom: Energy-Efficient Cluster-Based Routing Protocol for Scalable Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have been used in smart agriculture, industrial automation, and environmental monitoring applications, which require efficient and reliable routing with energy efficiency. Particularly the selection and operation of the cluster heads (CHs) play significant role in the performance of the network. In this work, we introduce a scalable, reliable and energy efficient cluster-based routing protocol (Fire Bloom), which combines adaptive CH selection and energy-aware routing. The cluster map and the packet flow intensity map even show the communication loads on the base station. The packet delivery ratio (PDR) of Fire Bloom is 97.2%, which is 6–10% better than the competing protocols. Fire Bloom achieved a PDR greater than 91% under a scalability test with 100–500 nodes, which means it can maintain good performance as the density of the network becomes denser. Energy usage is roughly proportional to the traffic volume but lower than previously reported values. Near-linear scalability at runtime is also proposed: increasing the number of nodes from 100 to 1,000 took from 1.2 s to 14.1 s. In general, Fire Bloom lowers overall end-to-end delay, increases load balancing across CHs, boosts energy efficiency, and it is resilient to changes in network conditions and maintains successful packet delivery. These results prove that it is capable of scalable and energy efficient deployments of WSN’s