EL-CRP: An Energy and Location Aware Clustering Routing Protocol in Large Scale Wireless Sensor Networks

With the development of Internet of Things (IoTs), large-scale wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are widely used in environment monitoring, industrial testing and intelligent transportation. In order to extend the lifetime of WSNs, it is necessary to reduce the energy consumption of sensors. To achieve the large-scale and flexible deployment, the wireless sensors are required to be low memory overhead. The existing WSN routing protocols are difficult to satisfy the requirements for low energy consumption and low memory overhead in those scenarios. This paper proposes an Energy and Location Aware Clustering Routing Protocol (ELCRP) for large-scale WSN application scenarios. Using an adaptive clustering method, in which the location and energy of cluster members are considered simultaneously, the protocol reduces the energy consumption and memory overhead in the WSNs. Extensive simulations and hardware tests are conducted to evaluate the performance. Results finally verify the advantages of the protocol in large-scale network scenarios.