Dynamic clustering and distance aware routing protocol for wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor network (WSN) consists of thousands of sensor nodes with low power, low memory, and low computational capabilities. Therefore, energy issues have to be taken into considerations while designing WSN applications and protocols. Routing protocols such as LEACH and LEACH-C have been proposed for energy conservation in WSN. However, these typical protocols have drawback of unequal energy depletion in cluster heads (CHs) due to the different transmission distance from each CH to the base station (BS). In order to minimize the energy consumption caused by large distance of CHs from the BS, we propose dynamic clustering and distance aware routing protocol (DDAR) for WSN which takes into account of node distance for selecting CH, dynamic approach of selecting the CH nodes, and two level hierarchy of clustering with super cluster head (SCH) node near to the BS. Simulation results show that the proposed DDAR protocol consumes about 15.5% less energy than conventional LEACH protocol.