Forwarding and routing cluster-based protocol for wireless sensor networks

This paper presents Forwarding and Routing Cluster-Based Protocol which aims to prolong wireless network lifetime by balancing energy consumption among all nodes. It avoids the premature death of the closest cluster-head (CH) for multi-hop protocols using hierarchical network clustering. FoRoC introduces two items: first, to take into consideration the node´s local informations during CHs selection steps, such as remaining energy and its coefficient of variation. And secondly, it also combines one-hop and multi-hop elementary path routing methods for data transfer for inter-cluster communication as a unique path. Furthermore, periodically changing the role between CH or end-node, and periodically changing the route between CHs and base-station, balances the CHs energy consumption. For going further towards the ideal energy balance which is illustrated by a coefficient of synchronous death. Simulation results show that the FoRoC shows great performance in terms of energy consumption and the network lifetime. Lifetime is increased by 80% compared to one-hop protocols. Compared to multi-hop protocol, FoRoC reaches a coefficient of synchronous death of 2.09.