HEERP: Hierarchical energy efficient routing protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensors Networks (WSN) are increasingly used in various applications such as environment tracking, health monitoring, industrial control and intrusion detection applications. WSN consists of small-sized nodes, deployed generally in inaccessible environment to the human, in order to collect information about it. These motes are autonomous and work with battery. The critical characteristic of these networks is energy, which is their main design constraint to increase their lifetime. Energy consumption has a major impact on all levels: application software, motes (software and hardware) routing and communication channel. This paper proposes a new routing mechanism to reduce energy consumption in WSNs, and subsequently increasing their lifetime. In particular, we describe a new routing protocol named: Hierarchical Energy Efficient Routing Protocol (HEERP). Using computer simulations, we show that HEERP outperforms LEACH, is the most existing popular routing pool.