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On-Demand Cluster Head Formation with Inherent Hierarchical Clustering and Reliable Multipath Routing in Wireless Sensor Networks
Nouman Bashir, Ziaul Haq Abbas and Ghulam Abbas
Timely delivery of information to the base station (BS) with reliability is a preferred characteristic of a wireless sensor network (WSN). Battery-powered sensor nodes having scarce energy resources and unpredictable link quality confine WSN performance to a certain level. A significant part of energy consumption occurs due to the communication subsystem, therefore, efficient routing is inevitable to prolong the network lifetime. This paper presents a novel on-demand cluster head formation with inherent hierarchical clustering and reliable multipath routing (HMR) protocol. In HMR, on-demand primary and secondary paths are formed. Nodes involved in the path announce themselves as cluster heads within their region of transmission forming natural clusters. HMR provides a fast path failure recovery mechanism while ensuring data transmission on the alternate path. The proposed HMR performs well in high-density network scenarios due to the availability of node-disjoint multiple paths. The performance of HMR is compared with the well-known AODV and hierarchical SHEAR protocols. The results demonstrate that HMR is more reliable, energy efficient and has low latency, specifically in high-density networks.
Keywords: Energy conservation, fast route failure recovery, hierarchical routing, multipath routing, wireless sensor network