An Energy-Balanced Cluster-Based Routing Protocol for Wireless Sensor and Actuator Network

Wireless sensor and actuator network is the extension of wireless sensor network. Wireless sensor and actuator network is made of sensor and actuator nodes. To overcome energy constraints of sensor networks, some energy-rich nodes (actuator nodes) are deployed in surveillance field. Due to energy heterogeneity of deployed nodes, sensor and actuator nodes have different responsibility. Sensor nodes gather data from surveillance field, and actuator nodes are responsible for transmission of collected data from sink. In this paper, an energy-balanced cluster-based routing protocol for wireless sensor and actuator networks is proposed. The network is divided into clusters, and the most energy-rich node among sensor nodes is selected as cluster head. Cluster head selection and actuator node selection metrics balance the energy consumption of network. Simulation results show the improvements in the performance parameters over the existing routing protocol. Simulation is carried out on network simulator (ns-2.35).