Design And Implementation Of High-efficient Clustering Routing Protocol Based On Optimal Cluster-Heads And Multi-hop Mechanism

With the rapid development of micro-sensor, embedded and low-power wireless communication technologies, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) attract more and more attention. They refer to the self-organizing multi-hop networks, in which the monitoring area is composed of many micro-sensor nodes and formed by wireless communication, aiming to collaboratively perceive, collect and dispose the information from the perceived objects in the network overlay area, and then send to the observer. They have broad application prospects, as national defense and military, health care, environmental monitoring, disaster sites and so on.Routing Protocol is one of the key technologies of WSN, it resolves the problem that how to transmit data in the network, and its performances are closely related to the entire network performances. For WSN, the energy of sensor nodes is usually limited. Once deployed, the small sensor nodes are usually inaccessible, and thus replacement or replenish of the energy source is infeasible. Hence, how to use the limited energy to effectively prolong the network lifetime is a key issue in WSN. Through effectively clustering and data fusion of the network, the clustering-based routing protocol can greatly lessen the redundant messages in the network; thereby significantly extend the lifetime of the network, and consequently becomes a hot spot in the research of WSN.In this paper, first analyzed several typical clustering routing protocols, in order to improve the poor performance of the existing protocols, a new high-efficient clustering routing protocol based on optimal cluster-heads and multi-hop mechanism(OCHM) was proposed, and explicitly introduced the design and implementation strategy of OCHM. The new protocol was divided into two phases, In the set-up phase, it can determine the optimal number of clusters according to the remaining number of sensor nodes rather than a fixed number, furthermore, the remaining energy and the geographical position of sensor nodes were fully considered in cluster-heads selection; In the steady-state phase, a modified multi-hop was adopted to send data from the cluster-heads to the base station rather than single-hop, distance and energy information is taken into account to select reasonable forwarding cluster-heads. Besides, data fusion is implemented too. Then, through optimal cluster-heads selection and revised multi-hop mechanism, can effectively balance the energy consumption of the sensor nodes and cut down the communication cost, thereby enhance the performance of the network.Simulation results show the OCHM protocol proposed in this paper has better performance compares to the typical clustering routing protocols. It has been shown that OCHM can dynamically adjust the number of clusters to make sure it always in optimal state, guarantee the cluster-heads distributed evenly in the network; enhances the effectiveness of energy and distributes the total energy consumption evenly; prolongs the network lifetime significantly and has better robustness and expansibility.