Hybrid energy-efficient multi-path routing for wireless sensor networks

The effectiveness of a wireless sensor network relies on the underlying routing protocol. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm which leverages both flat and hierarchical routing schemes for maximizing energy efficiency. It designates some desired number of nodes as cluster heads leading to cluster formation in the network. Inside clusters, nodes adopt multi-hop routing scheme to communicate with cluster head, which on reception of data packets from all cluster members, transmits the aggregated data along the precomputed path to the sink. Intra-cluster communication can happen in two modes viz., philanthropist-maximal residual energy neighbor node is selected, and selfish-nearest node is selected as next hop. Our approach refrain nodes from transmitting along long links, thus minimizing the energy consumption of the network. We simulated our algorithm against established protocols, and results indicate that it outperforms other protocols for network characteristics like energy minimization and scalability.