A Cluster Based Routing Protocol for Prolonging Network Lifetime in Heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) can provide low cost solutions to various real world problems. WSN consists of spatially distributed autonomous sensors to monitor physical or environmental conditions, such as temperature, sound, vibration, pressure, motion or pollutants and to cooperatively pass their data through the network to a main location. To consider energy balancing for nodes is an important factor in wireless sensor networks. Many routing, power management and data dissemination protocols have been specifically designed for WSNs where energy consumption is an essential design issue. Owing to the limited resources available for sensor nodes, designing energyefficient routing mechanism to prolong the overall network lifetime has become one of the most important technologies in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). The routing protocols for WSN can be classified in three main categories: data centric, hierarchical and location based. In this paper, we have proposed a cluster based routing protocol for heterogeneous WSN in order to minimize the energy consumption and increase the network survivability. As an active branch of routing technology, cluster-based routing protocols have proven to be effective in network topology management, energy minimization, data aggregation and so on. We have performed simulations in MATLAB. The results of proposed protocol are compared with the benchmark protocol LEACH. Keywords— Cluster based routing protocol, Wireless Sensor Network, sensor nodes, cluster head and LEACH