| A wireless sensor network refers to a group of sensors, or nodes, linked by a wireless medium to perform some distributed sensing tasks. The primary interest in wireless sensor networks is due to their ability to monitor the physical environment through ad hoc deployment of numerous tiny, intelligent, wireless networked sensor nodes. But traditional routing protocols developed for wireless ad hoc networks cannot be used for such sensor networks. This is because the conventional protocols mainly focus on avoiding congestion or maintaining the connectivity when faced with mobility, and not on the limited energy supply.; One of the sensor network routing protocols is Low-Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy (LEACH). LEACH is a cluster-based protocol that utilizes randomized rotation of a local cluster head to evenly distribute the energy load among the sensors in the network. In the thesis we proposed the energy-aware cluster head designed in terms of the mobile agent mechanism(EACHMA). Contrary to the cluster head in LEACH, this mobile agent cluster head moves to the highest available energy sensor with the least useful information about the sensors on its discretion. This characteristic enables the cluster head to filter events sent from the sensor nodes more effectively, which results in better events-report filtering, longer lifetime of sensors, and less frequent change of cluster head. Thus, with EACHMA we can achieve the better energy-saving wireless sensor network. |
