Optimization of energy-efficient transmission protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor network (WSN) technologies are increasingly employed in recent years for monitoring purposes in various fields ranging from the engineering industry to our immediate home environments due to their ability to intelligently monitor remote locations at low cost. While WSNs are continuously tasked to handle more complex functions, such as, data aggregation, frequent transmissions etc., in-network processing and intelligent computation still necessitate the available energy resources to be judiciously consumed in order to prolong their lifetime, since the nodes are often powered by batteries. In this thesis, our original contribution to knowledge is by developing three key strategies that can efficiently optimize transmission protocols in relation to offer an improved network lifetime for WSN deployments. Our first strategy involves a design of a cluster-based network layer routing protocol. We propose a purely deterministic model that utilizes clustering to organize the WSN. Our design is referred to as DEC: a deterministic energy-efficient clustering protocol. It is dynamic, distributive, self-organizing and it offers better energy efficiency compared with the existing protocols in the same domain. In addition, it utilizes a simplified approach that minimizes computational overhead to self-organize the sensor network. Our simulation result shows a better performance with respect to the energy consumption, which is reflected in the network lifetime of up to 2× improvement in both homogeneous and heterogeneous settings when compared with the existing protocols. It is worth mentioning that our approach approximates an ideal solution to offer a balanced energy consumption in hierarchical wireless sensor networks.