Virtual backbone tree based energy balanced hierarchical routing protocol

Design an energy efficient routing protocol for wireless sensor network is a very important issue because of the constrained energy of sensor nodes. In this paper, an energy efficient routing protocol (VBT-EBHRP) is proposed. In this protocol, a virtual backbone tree is constructed and based on the virtual backbone tree, a routing tree is constructed. The residual energies of the virtual backbone tree nodes are considered for the routing tree constructing. The properties of the virtual backbone tree are analyzed and the size of the virtual backbone tree as well as the network lifetime of VBT-EBHRP is simulated. Simulation results show that VBT-EBHRP is more energy efficient and can improve the network lifetime at most by 77% compared with Leach.