A novel energy-efficient balanced multi-hop routing scheme (EBMRS) for wireless sensor networks

Wireless Sensor Network has been recognized as an attractive candidate among the telecommunication, meteorology, and sensor industries for the last few years owing to its wide range of applications, including environmental- and industrial-monitoring. In this paper, the authors propose an Energy Balanced Multi-hop Routing Scheme (EBMRS) at both the inter- and intra-clustering level to discover the optimal route to the Base Station (BS) for maximizing energy efficiency. It selects the required number of sensor nodes as Cluster-Heads (CHs) based on their Probability of Selection (PS) metrics like the residual energy, the number of hop-counts, and the distance to the BS. Inside inter-cluster communication, each sensor node decreases their energy consumption by using nearest intermediate sensor node to communicate with the CH. During intra-cluster communication, CHs adopt multi-hop approach to transmit the aggregated data to the BS by finding a suitable CH that locates on the way to the BS. Moreover, to avoid unbalance cluster-formation, EBMRS ensure that the CHs locate at a minimum distance from each other. The outcomes report an improvement of a minimum of 40% in the network’s lifetime of the demonstrated WSN network employed with the proposed EBMRS strategy in distinction with the existing energy-efficient routing approaches.