CLEVER: Cluster-based Energy-aware Virtual Ring Routing in randomly deployed wireless sensor networks

Energy-aware routing is an important remedy to face the quick failure of energy-constrained nodes in Wireless Sensor Networks. Network clustering with electing energy-powerful nodes as cluster heads is a perfect solution. However, such clustering requires ideal nodes placement to afford best performances. Manual nodes placement is not always possible, the sensors can be randomly deployed. In such networks, the cluster heads cannot always communicate directly. In this paper, we present a novel clustering strategy for randomly deployed heterogeneous sensors, in which a cluster is defined as a set of energy-powerful nodes placed at the range of each other. The proposed protocol, called CLEVER (Cluster-based Energy-aware Virtual Ring Routing), uses virtual identity-based routing for intra and inter-cluster communications. The experimental results show that CLEVER increases drastically the network lifetime and optimizes efficiently sensors energy.