A Cluster-Based Energy-Efficient Routing Protocol without Location Information for Sensor Networks

With the recent advances in Micro Electro Mechanical System (MEMS) technology, low cost and low power consumption wireless micro sensor nodes have become available. However, energy-efficient routing is one of the most important key technologies in wireless sensor networks as sensor nodes are highly energy-constrained. Therefore, many researchers have proposed routing protocols for sensor networks, especially cluster-based routing protocols, which have many advantages such as reduced control messages, bandwidth re-usability, and improved power control. Some protocols use information on the locations of sensor nodes to construct clusters efficiently. However, it is rare that all sensor nodes know their positions. In this article, we propose another cluster-based routing protocol for sensor networks. This protocol does not use information concerning the locations of sensor nodes, but uses the remaining energy of sensor networks and the desirable number of cluster heads according to the circumstances of the sensor networks. From performance simulation, we found that the proposed protocol shows better performance than the low-energy adaptive clustering hierarchy (LEACH).