Research On Hierarchical Routing Protocol For Wireless Sensor Networks

In the wake of the rapid development of wireless communications, the technologies of sensing, computing and networking, wireless sensor networks which possess these technologies get more and more popular. For the medical checking, the geographic weather monitoring, the military investigation, the circumstance supervision of the family digital life, wireless sensor networks can be fit into them. Because of its extensive application prospect, the academic community gives more considerations to it.Compared to that in traditional networks, routing protocols in wireless sensor networks are different.The limitations of the energy and resources of wireless sensor networks determine the design way, requiring the routing protocols of wireless sensor networks to be low energy-consumpution, high energy efficiency, simple and fast, to prolong the network life-cycle more effectively.In my thesis, firstly, we introduce the concept and structure, characteristics and the key techniques of wireless sensor networks, and mainly introduce various existing hierarchical routing protocols, then analyse and research the advantages and disadvantages of these routing protocols and the algorithms.Secondly, on the basis of LEACH, aiming at the disadvantage of the cluster heads whose distribution are not uniform and single hop, we design a kind of hierarchical routing protocol based on virtual gird, which is suitable for large-scale network. On the basis of virtual gird this routing protocol selects the cluster heads that communicate with the sink node through the center nodes. It improves LEACH efficiently. The new routing protocol owns the advantages of prolonging the life-cycle and high efficiency.In the same time, we introduce the simulation software NS2, implement the routing protocol, LEACH-VG, on the basis of NS2 and complement many experiments on it. We analyse the result of LEACH-VG and compare to LEACH and LEACH-C We draw the conclusion according to the result of simulation that the routing protocol LEACH-VG possesses better capability in efficiency, dead time of node, life-cycle of network, and better scalability.Finally, by analysing the routing protocol of LEACH-VG, we propose some basic principles for designing hierarchical routing protocols.