Research On Energy Balanced Routing Algorithm Based On ZigBee Network

With the advancement of network communication and informationtechnology, wireless personal area network was paid great concern theoreticallyand practically. ZigBee is specially designed for wireless personal area networks,based on the IEEE802.15.4wireless communication protocol. With the merits ofZigBee protocol, like low overall system cost, fastness of transmit speed, and lowenergy consumption,it substitutes traditional wireless sensor system technologiesin fields of industry, medical, mobile communication and smart home systems.However, due to the theoretic immaturity of this newborn technology andcomplexity of its hardware implementation, there are numerous problems waitingfor researchers, such as the imbalance of energy and high liability of breakdownof some parts of the network systems. Nowadays some researchers devote to theimprovement of the network layer of ZigBee protocol, especially on the routingalgorithms to reduce energy consumption and to enlarge the life span of the entirewireless network.The paper considers the lifetime of individual nodes and overall energyconsumption of wireless networks, an improved energy-balanced routingalgorithm based on clustering and weigh measuring is proposed. After definingthe energy level and the weight of each node, we establish weigh measuring andclustering mechanisms avoiding unnecessary death of individual nodes. We alsorefine the data transmitting process,for instance, only the head of each cluster canbroadcast RREQ packets, which limits the direction of flooding and avoids toomany redundant RREQ packets. In mechanisms of changing and selecting headsof clusters, the concept of node similarity is introduced. The head of each clusterselects the one with largest similarity with itself in the FFD neighbor nodes to bethe alternative head of the cluster, which reduce possible costs of the topographicchanges of the network and avoid extra energy costs of re-clustering.For route repairing algorithms, we design different strategies for reconnecting two nodes inlight of their topographic differences. We implement the improved algorithm onthe NS2network simulator and measure the difference between our routingalgorithms and the ZBR routing algorithm of routing costs,end-to-end delays,packet delivery ratio,percentage of survived and the remaining energy ofnetwork.Simulation results indicate that,compared with the Cluster-Tree algorithm,the improved routing algorithm has a3.6%decrease in the energy consumption ofthe whole network and prolongs the network’s lifetime for about15%, whichmeans this improved algorithm can balance loads more and prolong lifetime ofZigBee wireless sensor networks.