EETBR: Energy efficient token-based routing for wireless sensor networks

The most significant drawback of wireless sensor networks is energy scarcity. As there is an increasing need for operating these networks for relatively long times, energy saving becomes the key challenge in the design of the architectures and protocols for sensor networks. Therefore, several research studies have been performed for making contributions to the analysis of this energy shortage problem. Most of these research activities have been focused on finding solutions for the energy consumption of the communication unit, which is the dominant energy dissipating component of the sensor nodes. In this paper, a novel, token-based routing protocol adapted with a multitier clusterbased architecture is presented. Most of the other cluster-based schemes mainly focus on intracluster organization and communication. However, it should be mentioned that a considerable amount of energy is dissipated during the intercluster communication when compared with intracluster communication. The architecture proposed here not only deals with intracluster communication, but also considers data aggregation, multihop data transmission, and best-effort next hop selection according to a cost factor that is described for the first time in this paper. The simulation results indicate that this token-based next hop selection method together with the multitier cluster-based architecture achieves a significant amount of energy savings, which inherently yields the prolongation of the network lifetime.