Distance Based Pre-cluster Head Selection Scheme for a Chain-Based Protocol

PEGASIS, a chain-based protocol, forms chains from sensor nodes so that each node transmits and receives from a neighbor. In this way, only one node (known as a HEAD) is selected from that chain to transmit to the sink. Although PEGASIS is able to balance the workload among all of the nodes by selecting the HEAD node in turn, a considerable amount of energy may be wasted when nodes which are far away from sink node act as the HEAD. In this study, DERP (Distance-based Energy-efficient Routing Protocol) is proposed to address this problem. DERP is a chain-based protocol that improves the greedy-algorithm in PEGASIS by taking into account the distance from the HEAD to the sink node. The main idea of DERP is to adopt a pre-HEAD (P-HD) to distribute the energy load evenly among sensor nodes. In addition, to scale DERP to a large network, it can be extended to a multi-hop clustering protocol by selecting a “relay node” according to the distance between the P-HD and SINK. Analysis and simulation studies of DERP show that it consumes up to 80% less energy, and has less of a transmission delay compared to PEGASIS.