An energy-efficient routing protocol for Hybrid-RFID Sensor Network

This paper proposes an integration architecture that combines conventional wireless sensor nodes, sensor-tags, hybrid sensor nodes and a base station into a smart network named Hybrid RFID-Sensor Network (HRSN). The HRSN as built presents an energy imbalance problem among nodes. This is due to the hybrid nodes sensing energy consumption, which constitutes a large part of the network´s residual energy. To implement the HRSN efficiently, a routing protocol that distributes the energy dissipation evenly among all nodes is proposed. The proposed routing protocol is a centralized cluster based protocol that assigns nodes different roles in the network based on their sensing energy properties. The algorithm achieves further energy reduction by letting the base station handle the key tasks, such as cluster formation and assignment of time. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed routing protocol achieves higher energy efficiency than Low Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy (LEACH) and LEACH-Centralized (LEACH-C). The algorithm also significantly prolongs the life span of the nodes with high-energy consumption.