HEER – A delay-aware and energy-efficient routing protocol for wireless sensor networks

Minimizing energy consumption to maximize network lifetime is one of the crucial concerns in designing wireless sensor network routing protocols. Cluster-based protocols have shown promising energy-efficiency performance, where sensor nodes take turns to act as cluster heads (CHs), which carry out higher-level data routing and relaying. In such case the energy consumption is more evenly distributed for all the nodes. However, most cluster-based protocols improve energy-efficiency at the cost of transmission delay. In this paper, we propose an improved delay-aware and energy-efficient clustered protocol called Hamilton Energy-Efficient Routing Protocol (HEER). HEER forms clusters in the network initialization phase and links members in each cluster on a Hamilton Path, constructed using a greedy algorithm, for data transmission purpose. No cluster reformation is required and the members on the path will take turns to become cluster head. The design allows HEER to save on network administration energy and also balance the load comparing to traditional cluster-based protocols. The algorithms designed in HEER also means that it does not suffer long delay and does not require each node to have global location information comparing with classic chain-based protocols such as PEGASIS and its variations. We implemented the HEER protocol in MATLAB simulation and compared it with several cluster-based and chain-based protocols. We found that HEER is able to achieve an improved network lifetime over the current protocols while maintaining the average data transmission delay. In the simulation, HEER achieved 66.5% and 40.6% more rounds than LEACH and LEACH-EE, which are cluster-based protocols. When compared with chain-based protocols (PEGASIS and Intra-grid-PEGSIS), HEER managed 21.2 times and 16.7 times more rounds than PEGASIS and Intra-grid-PEGASIS respectively. In addition, HEER can eliminated 90% of transmission delay comparing to LEACH and LEACH-EE and 99% comparing with PEGASIS and Intra-grid-PEGASIS.