Research On A Clustering-Based Routing Protocol For Wireless Sensor Network

As a result of the combination of low power computing, wireless communication and micro-sensor technology, wireless sensor networks have become a hot research area of computer science and technology. Due to the great promising and potential in various application, more and more researchers from industry field are engaged in this area, and several novel conceptual systems emerge as a result of its rapid development. Primary challenge in wireless sensor network is to extent network lifetime by reducing the energy consumption under the condition of limited energy.Considering the advantage of the wireless sensor network application in environmental monitoring, the routing protocols of wireless sensor network are introduced in this paper. Cluster-based routing protocols which are convenient in topology management, energy-efficient, are found very applicable to monitoring the environment, and therefore have become the emphases of the research in wireless sensor network at present. However, the performance of the cluster-based protocols need to be improved according to research on the cluster-based routing protocols represented by LEACH. Therafore a Multiple-level-based clustering multiple-hop routing protocol(MCMR) is proposed, which comprehensively considered factors such as load-balanced of network, multi-hops, remaining energy of nodes, node location and so on. In MCMR, SINK node with unrestricted energy is used to monitor the network and to cluster in hierarchy, which leads to uniform distribution of clusters and load- balance in the network.The innovation of this paper includes:(1) The cluster heads are chosen according to the probability combined by both node power and relative distance between nodes when choosing cluster heads of the first level; The cluster heads of the next level are chosen among the non cluster heads of the current clusters according to the cluster heads choosing rule.(2) The NextHop need to be recorded by cluster heads during clustering period. Data are directly transmitted to the NextHop recorded without searching routes during data transmission.The new protocol is described in detail, theoretical analysis of its performance is given in this paper. Simulation experiment is made on the NS2 (Network Simulator 2nd) platform. Performance such as network lifetime, number of packets received by SINK node and the average end-end delay is considered during the simulation. The experiment result demonstrates that MCMR shows better performance than the other two protocols, as it prolongs the lifetime of the network, has great practicability.