An uneven annulus sector grid-based energy-efficient multi-hop routing protocol for wireless sensor networks

Due to the limited energy of sensor nodes in wireless sensor networks (WSNs), it is crucial to design an energy-efficient routing protocol for WSNs. However, most current routing protocols cannot balance the energy consumption of nodes well, which leads to the hot spot problem and shortens the network lifetime. This paper proposes an uneven annulus sector grid-based energy-efficient multi-hop routing protocol (UASGRP). The proposed protocol employs an uneven annulus sector grid clustering approach that takes the base station (BS) as the center and divides the network area into annulus sector grids with unequal sizes to balance the energy consumption of nodes. Cluster head (CH) nodes and communication management (CM) nodes are combined to establish routes to transmit data, which lightens the load of CHs. In addition, a multi-hop relay transmission mechanism is used to support the scalability of the network. A nearest interlayer routing algorithm is designed to construct multi-hop transmission routes. Theoretical analysis proves that this algorithm can effectively reduce the energy consumption of relay transmission. Simulation results show that compared with other grid-based clustering schemes, UASGRP can better balance the energy consumption of the network and has greater scalability for various sizes of networks.