A dynamic clustering and routing protocol for multi-hop data collection in wireless sensor networks

For multi-hop data collection in wireless sensor network, a fundamental problem is to improve the energy efficiency with the constraint of network connectivity. The HCR protocol combines the gradient routing with dynamic clustering to provide connected and efficient inter-cluster topology with limited transmission range. However, it suffers from the imbalanced energy consumption which leads to the poor performance in network lifetime. In this paper, we analyze the energy consumption of HCR, and find that there is severe imbalanced energy consumption among the nodes in gradient k = 1, where the nodes can transmit their data to the sink directly. Based on this observation, we propose a new protocol termed as HCR-1, which uses the adaptive routing decision and the tunable cost function to balance the energy consumption of cluster heads. Simulation results show that HCR-1 protocol can effectively balance the energy consumption of nodes, and extend the network lifetime for over 30%.