An energy efficient routing protocol for Wireless Sensor Network

Energy is one of the most crucial issues in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Hierarchical routing protocols are best known for energy efficiency. In this paper, we propose an energy-efficient multi-hop hierarchical routing protocol which balances the load of network and reduces the cluster heads energy dissipation. According to the density of sensor nodes in monitoring area, the protocol can dynamically determine the size of the cluster. Furthermore, we propose a weight function to dynamically select the next hop appropriately and transmit data by multi-hop manner. Simulation results show that the new protocol can reduce energy consumption and obviously improve the network lifetime.