An Energy-Efficient Link Aware Routing Protocol for Clustered Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor network (WSN) is a collection of sensor devices within distributed and decentralized network architecture. The advances in wireless technology have facilitated the evolution of relatively inexpensive, low power, and small sensors, which are connected through a wireless medium. However, the decentralized architecture contributes to issues concerning link failure, node mobility, drop rate, routing overhead and resilience. In addition, certain issues like lower data reliability, lower network lifetime and high energy consumption further decrease the utilization of WSNs in recent applications. Clustering in a wireless sensor network is a technique that improves communication proficiency in WSNs. In every cluster, there is one cluster head (CH) used to administer the entire cluster. All communications are managed by the CHs, i.e., Intra-cluster and inter-cluster communications. The network efficiency is measured by load on CHs, number of CHs, lifetime of cluster nodes, the distance of CH from base station (BS) and the quality of wireless links between CH and member nodes. In this work, a multiobjective clustering technique is proposed that optimizes the network lifetime, average energy consumption, stability period, network delay and throughout. Specifically, we developed a clustering and routing protocol that divides the network field into equal-sized clusters and choose a CH based on a fitness function. This process prevents the draining nodes from serving as a cluster head any longer. The proposed strategy attains better energy efficiency and efficient load balancing. The simulation results showed better performance in terms of network lifetime by 11%, 27% and 63% compared with three heterogeneous protocols: ECHERP, PASCCC and QHCR respectively.