Simulation and Feasibility Analysis: Hierarchical Energy Efficient Routing Protocol (HEERP) for Wireless Sensor Network

Wireless sensor network is a network of sensing devices or nodes which have a limited power supply and processing capability. It is the sensor nodes which sense the environment and report the information gathered from the monitored region to the "sink" or the base station [1]. However the data transferred in a simple WSN is not on the basis of priority, therefore high priority data which needs immediate attention may get delayed due to congestion as a result the throughput, reliability and quality of data is affected. This paper proposes "Hierarchical Energy Efficient Routing Protocol for Wireless Sensor Network" (HEERP) through prioritization which provides a congestion free energy efficient path to urgent data packets, as a result of which the best path always remains available for the transmission of critical or high priority data. Simulation results show that HEERP results in low end to end delay, low packet delay variation time or jitter resulting in transfer of high quality sample, low packet loss ratio and high throughput and low utilization of energy as compared to simple WSN, resulting in maximized lifetime of the network.