An Enhanced Steiner Hierarchy (E-SH) Protocol to Mitigate the Bottleneck in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN)

The sensors in the wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are limited to energy resources and they are extensively deployed in unattended conditions. The bottleneck is an important criterion that diminishes the sensor node’s energy. The bottleneck can also contaminate the quality of service of a WSN by reducing the throughput, packet delivery ratio, network lifetime etc. In order to reduce the effect of bottleneck in WSN, a novel enhanced Steiner hierarchy (E-SH) protocol is presented in this paper. At the outset, every sensor in the WSN starts to broadcast a beacon signals to share its identity, hop distance and residual energy with its neighbors. Subsequently, the sensor nodes store the received information in the form of a table and it is updated periodically with the corresponding cluster head. The working principle of the proposed method is categorized into three stages, they are the sensor nodes clustering, optimal path detection, and optimal gateway detection. In the sensor nodes clustering, a weighted Steiner tree is constructed for efficient clustering of the sensor nodes in the WSN. A Revamped M-ATTEM ProTocol is employed to provide the optimal path solution. Finally, the optimal gateway is selected by MDLBP protocol, and the gateway links are validated for available bandwidth to ensure a reliable link. The performance of the proposed E-SH protocol is evaluated using the network simulator tool NS-2.35 and the operating system is Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus). The simulation results prove the improved efficiency of the proposed E-SH protocol based on the network benchmarks such as throughput, network lifetime, first node dead, packet delivery ratio and end to end delay.