Improvement of the WMSNs lifetime using multi-hop clustering routing protocol

Wireless multimedia sensor networks (WMSNs) can gather multi-media events such as road traffic accidents, object monitoring, and scalar data. Additionally, multimedia applications have the potential to generate substantial bandwidth congestion leading to greater energy usage. Researchers in WMSNs are constantly interested in designing and developing energy-efficient routing protocols. Numerous clustering routing protocols have been developed in recent years to overcome the limitation of consuming less energy and prolonging the lifetime of sensor nodes in homogeneous and heterogeneous WMSNs. Existing approaches depend on single-hop communication, in which sensor nodes consume more energy and die faster. Inter-communication nodes can play a more important role in reducing energy by transmitting sensing data in a multi-hop fashion to the base station. In this paper, an Energy-Efficient Multipath Clustering with Load balancing routing protocol for WMSNs (EEMCL) was proposed to minimize the energy consumption and prolong the network lifetime. Clustering-based routing with multi-hop would be used to implement the proposed protocol. To analyze and investigate the performance of the proposed protocol, a simulation model utilizing the MATLAB program is used. The simulation results show that the improvement rate for the proposed protocol is 75% when compared with modified-low energy adaptive clustering hierarchy (MODLEACH), and 65% when compared with energy-efficient multistage routing protocol (EE-MRP) in terms of the number of alive nodes and in terms of residual energy of normal sensor nodes, the improvement rate for the proposed protocol is 86% when compared with MODLEACH, and 67% when compared with EE-MRP.