QoS-Aware and Heterogeneously Clustered Routing Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have gained much attention in today's research domain for supporting a wide variety of applications including the multimedia applications. Multimedia applications that are regarded as the quality-of-service (QoS)-aware, delay sensitive, and bandwidth hungry applications require enough energy and communication resources. WSNs being the energy-scarce network have now been designed in such a way that they can support these delay-sensitive and time-critical applications. In this paper, we propose an energy-efficient routing protocol for heterogeneous WSNs to support the delay sensitive, bandwidth hungry, time-critical, and QoS-aware applications. The proposed QoS-aware and heterogeneously clustered routing (QHCR) protocol not only conserves the energy in the network, but also provides the dedicated paths for the real-time and delay sensitive applications. The inclusion of different energy-levels for the heterogeneous WSNs also provides the stability in the networks while minimizing the delay for the delay-sensitive applications. Extensive simulations have been performed to validate the effectiveness of our proposed scheme. Our proposed routing scheme outperforms other state-of-the-art schemes in terms of the delay performances.