Zone-based Energy Efficient Routing Protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel zone or grid-based network deployment framework for energy efficient selection and reselection process of Zone-Head (ZH) in the WSNs. The proposed zone head reselection process ensures energy efficiency, load balancing, and stability which further prolongs the network lifetime. Instead of carrying out periodic reselection of Zone-Head (ZH) that leads to extra energy consumption and network overhead, the protocol dynamically initiates the process of reselection based on residual energy level of ZH. In the proposed approach the process is segregated into four phases; deployment phase, the zone formation phase, zone head selection phase, data transmission phase and reselection phase. We implemented the proposed algorithm in MATLAB and its result outcomes reveal that the proposed method outperforms the competitive algorithms for parameters such as load balancing, total energy consumption and network lifetime.