Performance Evaluation of an Energy-Aware Clustering Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

This paper presents a clustering routing protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks. The protocol emphasizes short transmissions, as they are energy efficient. With the goal of balancing the load on the nodes the protocol alternates the proactively stored multiple paths toward the Sink. Moreover, the paths are employed whenever a faulty path is discovered on the route from a source node to the Sink in order to provide fault tolerance. The protocol also provides Quality of Service by selecting a least cost path for high priority messages. We discuss the implementation of our protocol and present results of simulation experiments.