An Energy Aware Distributed Clustering Routing Protocol for Energy Harvesting Wireless Sensor Networks

Energy harvesting wireless sensor networks (EH-WSNs) have been widely used in various areas in recent years. Unlike battery-powered wireless sensor networks, EH-WSNs are powered by energy harvested from ambience. This change calls for new designs on routing protocols in EH-WSNs. This paper proposes a novel energy-aware distributed clustering routing protocol for EH-WSNs, it takes the node current residual energy and the harvested energy in a short term prediction horizon into cluster heads election process of the distributed clustering routing. A neural network based solar energy prediction model is exploited to make the protocol energy-aware. Nodes with higher residual energy and stronger energy harvesting capabilities thus have higher probability of being cluster heads. The proposed routing algorithm is compared with LEACH (low-energy adaptive clustering hierarchy) in terms of the number of awake nodes and network throughput. Simulation results show that the proposed clustering routing has stronger ability to balance energy consumption among sensor nodes and increases the network throughput by about 30% over LEACH.