Energy Efficient Routing Protocol for an IoT-Based WSN System to Detect Forest Fires

Abstract

Around a third of the world’s surface area is covered with forests. This is about 4–5 billion hectares of land. We are losing an additional 3 million hectares of forest cover each year than we did in 2001. Hence, researchers worldwide have been working on the identification and prevention of forest fires more aggressively. The wireless sensor network technology for forest fire detection was established as a result of the shortcomings of standard forest fire detection techniques in real time. This paper proposes an energy-aware Internet of Things (IoT) based Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) model with an efficient clustering and routing technique for forest fire detection. The proposed model is named Energy Efficient Routing Protocol (EERP). The model decreases the energy utilization in sensor nodes by minimizing idle listening in cluster heads. EERP also minimizes the transmission of redundant data by allowing only the sensor nodes close to an event to report the event. Furthermore, the model ensures that sensor nodes with low energy levels do not become cluster heads. EERP uses multi-hop routes to send data from source nodes to the Base Station. The performance of EERP is compared with that of some existing Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols in various scenarios. The simulation results prove that the proposed model reduces energy consumption in sensor nodes significantly.