CHEARP: Chord-based hierarchical energy-aware routing protocol for wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Wireless Sensor networks (WSNs) are mostly deployed in hostile environments, where nodes may do not have any information about their location. Hence, the designed routing protocols and applications have to function independently from the nodes location. Moreover, extending lifetime in such networks is a critical and challenging issue, since they consist of miniaturized energy-constrained devices. The motivation of this paper is to design an energy efficient locationindependent routing protocol for data delivery in WSNs. Therefore, a Chord-based Hierarchical Energy-Aware Routing Protocol (CHEARP) is developed with the focus on preserving the energy consumption. In contrary to the existing DHT-based protocols that interconnect nodes independently of their physical proximity, this paper proposes an approximate logical structure to the physical one, where the aim is to minimize the average paths? length. Simulation results show that the proposed solution reduces the transmission Load, minimizes the transmission delay, and extends the network longevity.