Clustering based energy efficient congestion aware protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have inherent and unique characteristics rather than traditional networks. They have many different constraints, such as computational power, storage capacity, energy supply and etc. Energy aware routing protocol is very important in WSN, but routing protocol which only considers energy has not efficient performance. Therefore considering other parameters beside energy efficiency is crucial for protocols efficiency. Depending on sensor network application, different parameters can be considered for its protocols. Congestion management can affect routing protocol performance. Cluster-based architectures are one of the most practical solutions in order to cope with the requirements of large-scale wireless sensor networks (WSN). Cluster-head election problem is one of the basic QoS require-ments of WSNs, yet this problem has not been sufficiently explored in the context of cluster-based sensor networks. Specifically, it is not known how to select the best candidates for the cluster head roles. In this paper, we investigate the cluster head election problem and congestion management problem. Specifically concentrating on applications where the energy of full network is the main requirement, and we propose a new approach to exploit efficiently the network energy, by reducing the energy consumed for cluster forming and reducing the congestion to provide the better efficiency for the high priority data.