Research On Low-Power Routing Protocol For Wireless Sensor Network

As a new method of data collection, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) has had a profound influence to modern science and technology. With the continuous expansion of WSN applications, it has been on higher requirements. The routing protocols of network layer have a direct impact on the performance of WSN's system. Therefore, the research of routing protocols for WSN is becoming the focus in the field.The characteristics of WSN have determined that the classical routing protocols cannot meet its requirements. One of the key restrictions is that the processing ability and energy of the wireless sensor nodes are very limited. Cluster-based routing protocols, with the characteristics of hierarchical structure, energy efficiency and data fusion, have an obvious advantage of reducing the energy consumption and extending the life of the networks. However, the analysis of LEACH indicated that current cluster-based protocols have the insufficiency in cluster-heads election algorithms and communication manners with the base stations, and are still to be improved.Researching cluster-based routing protocol for WSN is the main part of this work. The cluster-heads election algorithms of the existing routing protocols have not considered the energy status, or need to maintain the overall energy status of the nodes. It is not conducive to efficient use of the limited energy. To solve this problem, this paper presents a new cluster-heads election algorithm based on local energy status of the nodes. In this algorithm, the local initial energy and current energy of the node are considered in cluster-heads election, and a control parameter is introduced to adjust the effect. It avoids the low-energy node becoming a cluster-head effectively. Moreover, multi-hop is used in the way of communication with the base station to reduce the energy consumption of the cluster-heads. By dividing the clusters according to the distance to the base station, energy requirements of the system are distributed among all the nodes.By making a simulation on MATLAB, the result shows that the improved protocol has balanced network load and extended the network lifetime effectively.