A CLUSTERING PROTOCOL BASED ON TREE ROUTING ALGORITHM IN WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS (WSNs)

In today’s world Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are an emerging technology for monitoring physical environment. WSNs consist of small nodes with sensing, computation and wireless communications capabilities. These sensor nodes are constrained in energy supply, processing and storage. Such constraints combined with a typical deployment of large number of sensor nodes have posed many challenges to the design and management of sensor networks. The main drawback of WSNs is their very limited battery energy which has great influence on the lifetime of the network. The design is affected by several constraints that call for new paradigms. In this paper, we propose routing algorithm called Chain-Tree based Routing Algorithm (CTRA), which makes full use of the advantages of LEACH and PEGASIS, and provides improved performance. It divides WSNs into a few chains and runs in two stages. In first stage, sensor nodes makes network into group of clusters with chain routing inside the cluster. Sensor nodes in each chain transmit data to their own chain leader node in a cluster, using an improved chain routing protocol. In the second stage, all chain leader nodes form a tree routing in a self organized manner. Experimental results demonstrate that our CTRA algorithm out performs LEACH in terms of energy consumption, throughput and network delay. KeywordsWireless sensor networks, LEACH Protocol, Cluster mechanism, Chain based routing, Binary tree