A reliable and energy-efficient chain-cluster based routing protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Reliable and energy-efficient data dissemination is an important challenge particularly in multi-hop Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Although clustering is considered as one of the promising techniques for energy aware data dissemination, majority of research in this area assume a reliable network, in which no packet is lost due to low link quality. In this paper we propose REC+, a Reliable and Energy-efficient Chain-cluster based routing protocol, which aims to achieve the maximum reliability in a multi-hop network by finding the best place for the Cluster Head (CH) and the proper shape/size of the clusters without the need of using any error controlling approaches that can be quite expensive in terms of computation and communication overhead. Most importantly, REC+ relaxes some strong assumptions that other cluster-based routing algorithms rely on, which make them inapplicable for real WSNs. To the best of our knowledge, REC+ is the first cluster based routing algorithm that considers energy efficiency, transmission reliability and intra-cluster delay all together to construct clusters and select proper CHs in WSNs. In the simulation, we show superiority of our approach over three others in terms of the product of energy consumption and delay.