Lifetime optimization of Wireless Sensor Network through energy efficient clustering for robust data routing

Many routing protocols have been designed and evaluated for Wireless Sensor Networks using simulation tools. Only a few of these proposed works have been tested in real world scenarios. This paper presents a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) data aggregation & routing protocol that is particularly suited to largely deployed sensor networks. The proposed mechanism combines a gradient based routing scheme with the hierarchical scheme of the LEACH protocol. By combining these two protocols and taking the important factor of node energy into consideration when selecting the cluster heads, a robust strategy for data aggregation and routing is developed. Simulation results show that the proposed protocol improves the wireless sensor network performance in two ways. First, the data aggregation feature reduces 75% data load on the network and second, energy aware clustering and cost aware multi-hop communication increases the lifetime of network as compared to LEACH and EEPSC routing protocols.