A low energy and adaptive routing architecture for efficient field monitoring in heterogeneous wireless sensor networks

Wireless Sensor Networks are composed of low cost and extremely power constrained sensor nodes scattered over a spatial region. They form multi-hop and self organized networks, making energy consumption a crucial design issue. Research has shown that clustering sensor nodes is an efficient method to manage energy consumption for prolonging the network lifetime, but most of routing protocols focus on homogeneous sensor networks and they are not optimized for the characteristics of heterogeneous networks, in which a percentage of the sensor nodes is equipped with additional energy capacities. In this paper we evaluate the performance of a new scalable architecture HARP, Hierarchical Adaptive and Reliable Routing Protocol, in a heterogeneous scenario. HARP provides efficient link fault tolerance and also supports node mobility management. Furthermore, a new cluster head election formulation protocol (s-HARP) has been adapted to heterogeneous networks. Our performance evaluation has shown that HARP and s HARP can significantly reduce the energy consumption and prolong the useful lifetime of the network outperforming some popular existing clustering protocols.

1. INTRODUCTION

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN's) are composed of sensors nodes which are resource constrained devices with limited power, computation and communication capabilities. Data gathering is a typical operation in many applications of WSN's, where reliable environment monitoring is important. A key determinant of their effectiveness is their longevity, which is limited by the energy that can be stored in each node [1], [2]. Since scheduling the energy utilization by minimizing the data processing and communication costs can extend the lifetime of the network, routing has become a key research topic in WSN and their applications.