| Recent advances in sensor technology, low-power electronics, and low-power radio frequency design have enabled the large scale application of inexpensive and low-power wireless sensors that can be connected via a wireless network. With the virtue of quick and agile construction of network, wireless sensor networks (WSN) can be applied in a lot of areas, such as military affairs, disaster alarm and salvation, space exploration, environment and meteorological monitoring, intelligent transportation, and intelligent home automation system, etc. As a new research field, WSN is one of the most promising technologies, in which both academia and industries have showed great interest.Routing is one of the most important technologies in WSN. However, sensor nodes are usually distributed in hard environment where energy is difficult to be supplied. So saving energy is a core and basic problem in WSN. Thus a routing protocol in consideration of energy-efficiency for WSN is studied and designed in this paper.Firstly WSN is introduced briefly in the paper. Then some existent typical routing protocols in WSN are analyzed comparatively. It is known that there are two typical routing ways in WSN: cluster-based routing and flat routing. Cluster-based routing is commonly considered as one of the most energy-efficient approaches. However, its performance is not very good when there are a small number of sensor nodes distributed sparsely in the network. The paper mainly gives a detailed theory analysis about energy consumption in WSN using cluster-based routing and flat routing respectively. Finally a new hybrid routing scheme (HRS) combining these two routing approaches for WSN is proposed and designed. Cluster-based routing is used in dense network. And flat routing is used when the network is sparse. Simulation results show that our HRS is more energy-efficient than existent HEED in prolonging the network lifetime. |
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