A NEW HIERARCHICAL ROUTING PROTOCOL MLHEED FOR LARGE SCALE WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORK

Abstract

The choice of routing protocols is an important element for large scale wireless sensor network. These protocols allow minimization of information processing at each sensor. Indeed, each packet sent or received use a limited energy resources. The best flow of information minimizes the energy consumption which is provided in this case by battery. It is a limited resource and can quickly run out. The frequent replacement of the latter in this context is excluded. To remedy this problem, we propose in this paper a new hierarchical protocol MLHEED (Multi-Level Hybrid, Energy-Efficient, Distributed approach). This protocol takes into account these critical points that characterize this type of network. Its objective is to maximize the lifetime of the network after deployment. For this, we adopted a multi-hop routing between elected nodes (cluster head). The protocol MLHEED is based on the HEED protocol for organizing wireless sensor network in the form of clusters, and selecting one representative for each cluster (cluster head). We adopted two approaches: the first approach is based on the execution of HEED protocol, after each level to another, which results in a multi-hop communication. The second approach is an improvement of the first, since the execution of HEED protocol at level passage becomes costly in terms of energy consumption. Thus, we adopted a method for the selection of cluster head. This method takes into account two factors which are the distance between the cluster heads and the base station, and the residual energy in the election (cluster head).