Hierarchical Clustering Routing Protocol Based on Optimal Load Balancing in Wireless Sensor Networks

Nowadays, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are widely used in different aspects of human life such as agriculture, health care systems, traffic engineering and so on. By improving WSN’s design and applicability, still due to energy limitation in the sensors, the main concern is about the lifetime of sensors. Beside hardware aspect, establishing some efficient techniques for data sensing, processing and transition in the sensors can increase WSN’s lifetime. In this paper, a new optimized routing protocolcalled OLBHC (Optimal Load Balancing Hierarchical Clustering) is designed. In contrast to some traditional methods such as LEACH, OLBHC could decrease the energy consumption in the sensors by utilizing the equalization method. In OLBHC, a Flag matrix which stores cluster head nodes’ connection status is used and then an optimization algorithm is applied for selecting the best clusters in the network based on the energy consumption. The simulation results prove this proposed approach’s efficiency because by applying OLBHC the average lifetime of nodes is about 160% longer than LEACH and almost all of the nodes are dead in LEACH when the first node begins to die in OLBHC.