Weighted Energy Efficient Clustering Hierarchy for Multi-hop Communication in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks are constrained in terms of energy resources and therefore require efficient energy management during collection, processing, aggregation, communication and eventual utilization of sensor’s data in several customized applications related to healthcare, group and habitat monitoring, security and surveillance etc. Cluster based hierarchical routing is known to be superior than flat routing as all nodes in the cluster send their data to cluster head for forwarding to base station. Existing cluster based hierarchical routing protocols either assume the direct communication between cluster heads and base station or through multi-hops in some scenarios. In this paper, a new energy efficient hierarchical clustering and multi-hop communication protocol has been presented. Simulation results confirm the superiority of proposed protocol as compared to standard LEACH protocol and it’s variants in terms of average lifetime, dissipation of energy and effect of node density in wireless sensor networks.