RSCHE: A Virtual Grid Structure Based Routing Scheme with Cell-Header Group Exchanged for Wireless Sensor Network

In wireless sensor network (WSN), sensor nodes equipped with batteries are randomly deployed to collect massive data. Since nodes’ energy source is usually not rechargeable or replaceable, energy efficiency has always been a chanlleging task for WSN in terms of network lifetime. Among existing works, introducing mobile sinks to WSNs has been considered as an energy efficient way for data collection. Under these circumstance, the network topology becomes dynamic due to sink’s mobility. Consequently, it incurres more communication cost to maintain the routing path and thus decreases the network life time. In this paper, we present a routing scheme with cell-header group exchanged (RSCHE) based on virtual grid structure for WSN. Our method partitions the sensor area into uniform-sized grid cells, in which cell-header is elected to transmit information. Those cell-headers are divided into two groups: Indirect communication cell-header (ICH) group and Direct communication cell-header (DCH) group. Despite their mission of collecting data from cell members, cell-headers in DCH group are also responsible for gathering information from cell-headers which belong to ICH group. Furthermore, we set an exchange time (Exch_t) value for ICH and DCH to optimize the routing path. Simulation results show that our proposed protocol performs better compared with existing works in terms network lifetime and energy consumption.