EAREC: energy aware routing with efficient clustering for sensor networks

Energy efficiency is one of the most challenging issues in wireless sensor network as the sensors have to serve unattended. Cluster based communication can reduce the traffic on the network and gives the opportunity to other sensors for periodic sleep and awake and thus saves energy. Passive clustering is less computational and light weight. In cluster based approach, cluster heads and gateways have to have maximum energy to be awaken for all the times. Existing passive clustering algorithm uses first declaration method without any priority generates severe collisions in the network and form the clusters very dense with large amount of overlapping regions. This results increased number of gateways. We have proposed several modifications for the existing passive clustering algorithm to prolong the life time of the network with better cluster formation. More -over, our proposed solution finds the optimum path between sources and sinks using the tiny cache memory of the intermediate nodes. Simulation result shows that EAREC saves significant amount of energy and at the same time keeps the delay and success rate satisfactory.