An Energy-Efficient Multi-hop Hierarchical Routing Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Clustering provides an effective method for improving the performance of wireless sensor networks (WSNs). In this paper, we study that different number of clusters leads to different network performance on the energy consumption, energy balancing and network lifetime. We propose an Energy-Efficient Multi-hop Hierarchical Routing Protocol (MHRP) for wireless sensor networks to enhance the network lifetime and avoid the formation of energy holes. MHRP is a hierarchical routing protocol which selects sensor nodes with criterion of residual energy level to act as cluster heads and establish intra-cluster multi-hop routing based on the tradeoff between the two criteria of residual energy level and distance. Simulation results show that our MHRP can largely reduce the total energy consumption and significantly prolong the network lifetime compared to other routing algorithm like LEACH.