WECRR: weighted energy-efficient clustering with robust routing for wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Usually, Wireless Sensor Network operates in a wide range of untrustworthy environments that are deployed in an ad-hoc approach. Although different cluster-based schemes have been proposed for improving network lifetime, however, most of the existing solutions incur probabilistic methods, which result in non-uniform energy consumption and imbalanced load distribution. In addition, end-to-end route discovery is non-optimized in terms of the limited resources of sensor nodes, which leads to frequent route discoveries and network overheads. In this research paper, we present Weighted Energy-Efficient Clustering with Robust Routing (WECRR) protocol that maintains balanced energy consumption and improves network-wide data delivery performance. The contributions of our proposed WECRR protocol are: Firstly, WECRR initiates a deterministic approach to avoid the uncertainties in Cluster Heads election mechanism and performs bounded clustering mechanism. Secondly, it provides multi-level optimized routing decision by making use of multi-facet attributes. At the end, it provides a route maintenance strategy, upon encounters any faulty or exhausted nodes on primary route, which results in reducing re-transmissions and route breakages. Simulation results reveal improved performance of WECRR protocol than compared to existing work.