A New Energy-Efficient Cluster-Based Routing Protocol Using a Representative Path in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have been broadly studied with advances in ubiquitous computing environment. Because the resource of a sensor node is limited, it is important to use energy-efficient routing protocol in WSNs. The cluster-based routing is an efficient way to reduce energy consumption by decreasing the number of transmitted messages to the sink node. LEACH is the most popular cluster-based routing protocol, which provides an adaptive cluster generation and cluster header rotation. However, its communication range is limited since it assumes a direct communication between sensor nodes and a sink node. To resolve this problem, we propose a new energy-efficient cluster-based routing protocol, which adopts a centralized clustering approach to select cluster headers by generating a representative path. To support reliable data communication, we propose a multihop routing protocol that allows both intra- and intercluster communications. Based on a message success rate and a representative path, the sensor nodes are uniformly distributed in clusters so that the lifetime of network can be prolonged. Through performance analysis, we show that our energy-efficient routing protocol outperforms the existing protocols up to 2 times, in terms of the distribution of cluster members, the energy consumption, and the reliability of a sensor network.