A Distributed Approach to Construct Hierarchical Structure for Routing with Balanced Energy Consumption in WSNs

A wireless sensor network (WSN) consists of a large number of sensor nodes distributed over a geographical area. A basic problem of WSNs is to reduce their energy consumption in order to enhance their life time. So, minimizing energy consumption becomes the most critical factor in the design of almost all WSN protocols. For end-to-end data transmission, media access control (MAC) and routing protocols play an important role in WSNs. Besides, these protocols mostly use the hierarchical structure for end-to-end reliable data delivery. The time and energy required to generate a hierarchical structure in a sequential manner is always high. So, in order to mitigate the above challenges, in this paper, we propose a distributed algorithm to generate the hierarchical structure where each node has two parent nodes except the root node. The intermediate nodes of the generated tree remain awake as they are selected as parent node based on their energy level, and other nodes are to be kept in the sleep mode in order to conserve energy. The distributed tree structure is periodically reconstructed considering the remaining energy of each node with a view to balance energy consumption of nodes in the whole WSN. The proposed approach also considerably reduces the average energy consumption rate of each node as we are able to put more number of nodes in the sleep mode in a distributed manner as compared to the existing approaches. Simulation studies of the proposed approach have been carried out using Castalia simulator and its performance has been compared with the existing sequential approach.