2009 Second International Symposium on Computational Intelligence and Design

Energy Equalizing Routing Algorithm for Wireless Sensor Networks

Tao Liu1,2 , Yunan Gu1,2 1 JiangSu Province Support Software Engineering R&D Center for Modern Information Technology Application in Enterprise 2 Dept. of Electronic & information engineering, Suzhou Vocational University Suzhou,China Email: banklt@163.com, gyn@jssvc.edu.cn Zhifeng Hu Dept. of Electronic & information engineering, Suzhou Vocational University Suzhou,China Email: huzf@jssvc.edu.cn

AbstractBecause the nodes of wireless sensor networks have the very limited energy, the main design goal for wireless sensor networks routing is how to improve energy efciency. As a scheme to solve this problem, an energy equalizing routing algorithm (EERA) for wireless sensor networks was proposed. In the cluster head product phase, the candidates compete for cluster heads according to their residual energy within some coverage range and the distance between each other in order to make the distribution of cluster heads balanced and cover all networks. In data transmission phase, a multi-hop routing tree among the cluster heads was built to send data to the base station according to the residuary energy of the cluster heads and the distance between them, so that the communication load can be reduced. The simulation results show that the new algorithm can reduce the energy consumption and prolong the network lifetime. Keywords-Wireless Sensor Networks; energy equalizing; cluster; routing algorithm

network energy efciently. Based on the clustering model, an Energy Equalizing Routing Algorithm (EERA) is proposed in this paper. In the algorithm, cluster heads are selected based on the routing utility evaluation function so that the overall network lifetime is prolonged. II. E NERGY EFFICIENCY EVALUATION FOR NODES AND
ROUTES

I. I NTRODUCTION Wireless Sensor Networks usually have large network scales and are composed of dense nodes with limited energy[1]. Thereby, the design of their routing protocol has to cater to the special characteristics of them[2]. After some research, there have already been many routing protocols proposed for wireless sensor networks in the literature[3 8]. Among them, the LEACH[3] protocol and its improvements[4, 5, 7] are classic cluster based routing protocols. In them, the cluster heads are selected randomly to even out the energy consumption among all the nodes, so that the overall lifetime of the network is prolonged. However, the randomness in the selection of the cluster heads may result in some poor clustering schemes. On the other hand, single hop communication is adopted for the communications between the cluster heads and the nodes inside the cluster as well as the communication between the cluster heads and the base station. Since cluster heads are usually far away from the base station and the energy consumption in the communication grows exponentially with the distance, the single hop communication can result in large energy consumptions. Therefore, these protocols can not use the
978-0-7695-3865-5/09 $26.00 2009 IEEE DOI 10.1109/ISCID.2009.143 546 545

A. Energy efciency evaluation for nodes During the topological optimization of the wireless sensor network, the establishment of routes between the nodes is of main concern. During the establishment of a route, the residual energy of the node itself as well as the energy distribution among its neighboring nodes should be taken into consideration. For any neighboring node, the further away it is from the current node, the more energy it needs to complete one communication. On the contrary, the closer a neighboring node is to the current node, the less energy it needs to complete one communication. The utility function for the node can thus be built as f (x) = ek + e (1)

where: ri is the distance of node i from the current node k, ei i s the remaining energy of node i. f (ei , ri )was constructed to reect the problem effectively in the simulations. The construction of f (ei , ri ) should take into account the remaining energy at node i and its distance from node k. The function should satisfy the following conditions: (1) If it is far away from node k, node i should have larger energy and a larger function value. (2) If it is close to node k, node i should have smaller larger energy and a larger function value. The effective mean energy is dened as follows: e= 1 n1
n

ei
i=1,i=k

(2)

Combining Eq.(2) and Eq.(3), the node inuential function is described as follows:

A. The phase of cluster establishment f (x) = ek + n1

n i=1,i=k

ri ei ri + 1

(3)

B. The energy utility evaluation of the routes Since the energy consumption in the communication grows exponentially with the distance between the nodes, multi-hop communication should be adopted for the communication between the cluster heads and the base station. Through the establishment of a multi-hop route, only the root node of the route needs to communicate with the base station over a long distance, while the other cluster heads only need to communicate within a close distance. In this paper, a route utility function g(chi) is dened to help the cluster heads to establish a multi-hop route. The function is dened as: Ei dmax di + Er di dmin

g(chi ) =

(4)

in which Er and Ei are the residual energy and the initial energy of the cluster head CHi respectively. d i is the distance from the CHi to the base station. dmax is the farthest distance from the base station in the network. dmix is the closest distance from the base station in the network. and ian are both constants, and +=1. They are used to balance the energy and distance parameters. Obviously, the cluster heads that are closer to the base station and have a larger amount of residual energy possess a higher value of the utility function. III. T HE E NERGY E QUALIZING ROUTING A LGORITHM The Energy Equalizing Routing Algorithm species the cluster heads in the network based on the value of the energy efciency function of the nodes. The costs of the routes are calculated based on the route utility function, and communication routes are established based on the cluster heads with small costs. The execution of the algorithm is comprised of many cycles, each of which consists of the cluster establishment phase and the data communication phase. The cluster establishment phase begins with the selection of the cluster heads, which is followed by the stage in which all the other nodes join into the clusters. During the data communication phase, once there is data to be transmitted, a route is established based on the utility function g(chi). The nodes in the cluster then send the information they have received during their time slot directly to the cluster head, and turn off their radio at other time slots to save energy. The cluster head integrates the data and sends it out during the last time slot.
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The network is rstly classied into clusters, after which the selection of cluster heads is optimized based on all the state information of the neighboring nodes. Lastly, the information of the selected cluster head is broadcast throughout the cluster. This is composed of 4 stages in detail: (1) the initial classication of the network into clusters: during this stage, current clustering algorithms (such as LEACH) could be used to classify the network into initial clusters. Blind spots might appear in the network after the temporary clusters and cluster heads are selected in this stage. (2) the collection of state information of the nodes by the temporary cluster heads: the neighboring nodes in the cluster send their position and state information to the temporary cluster head. The temporary cluster head now has the position information of its neighboring nodes P {p1 , p2 , ..., pn } and the energy information E{e1 , e2 , ..., en }, in which n stands for the number of nodes in the cluster, pi stands for the position of the i-th node and ei is the amount of energy the i-th node has. (3)the selection of cluster heads is optimized based on the energy utility function of the nodes. (4)clusters are established based on the optimized cluster heads. During this stage, the optimized cluster head information is broadcast to the nodes in the cluster by the cluster head, so that the information of the nodes in the cluster is collected and integrated by the optimized cluster head. Since the state information of the neighboring nodes has been integrated during the formation of the optimized cluster, the energy consumption of the nodes in the cluster is balanced and the frequent appearance of blind nodes is thus avoided. B. The phase of data communication The routing algorithm executes in a multi-hop mode. The multi-hop routes are established through the following processes: (1) each cluster head calculates the value of its own route utility function g(chi ) following the establishment of the clusters. (2) each cluster head broadcasts to its neighboring cluster heads a message that includes its node ID and the value of its g(chi ). (3) each cluster head compares the value of its own g(chi) with those in the messages it has received, and choose the cluster head with the largest g(chi ) value as its parent node. (4) the node with the largest g(chi ) value is chosen as the root node of the multi-hop route. [5] the cluster heads integrate the received data along the established route and send it through the established route to the root node, which sends it directly to the base station. IV. S IMULATION EXPERIMENT The NS-2 network simulator is adopted for experiments in this paper. The wireless communication system model from [9] is adopted to compare the average energy consumption and number of survived nodes of EERA and LEACH. The main network parameters are set as follows: 100 nodes are scattered randomly over an area of 100100O. The base

station is located outside the area and the locations of the nodes are xed; the initial energy of the nodes is set as 2J the cycle of cluster head selection in LEACH lasts for 50s, and the percentage of cluster heads among the nodes P is set as 5%; altogether 20 trigger events are scheduled throughout the simulation, which are randomly distributed in the simulation area; the simulation lasts for 900s. The results of the simulation are shown in Fig 1 and Fig 2. The change in the number of surviving nodes over time is shown in Fig 1.

occur over time, the clustering algorithm in EERA can better reect the characteristics of the events and thus reduces the communication load. As a result, the death rate of the nodes with the use of EERA is considerably lower than that of the LEACH algorithm. The average energy consumptions over time of the nodes with the use of the two algorithms are shown in Fig 2. It can be seen that under the same circumstances, the average amount of energy consumption of the nodes with the use of EERA is considerably smaller than that of LEACH. Therefore, more energy is consumed with the use of the LEACH algorithm under the same circumstances. V. C ONCLUSION An energy equalizing routing algorithm (EERA) for wireless sensor networks is proposed in this paper. The energy utility evaluation function is dened for the nodes in the algorithm, and candidate nodes compete for cluster heads according to their residual energy and positions, so that the selected cluster heads are evenly distributed to balance the network coverage; Adopting a multi-hop communication tree among the clusters, a route utility evaluation function is dened to select the cluster heads to establish the communication route, so that the communication load at the cluster heads is reduced and the overall energy consumption is reduced. The simulation results show that the network lifetime is effectively prolonged with the use of the EERA algorithm as compared with the LEACH algorithm. ACKNOWLEDGMENT This research was supported by the Opening Project of JiangSu Province Support Software Engineering R&D Center for Modern Information Technology Application in Enterprise (No. eisecSX200806), and sponsored by Qing Lan Project, the Science & Technology Foundation of Fujian Province (No. 2008F5046), and the 2009 Senior Talent Culture Project of Suzhou Municipal Government. R EFERENCES

Figure 1.

Number comparison of surviving nodes

Figure 2.

Average energy consumption comparison of nodes

[1] Yu haibin and Zeng peng, Smart wireless sensor network systems, Beijing: Science Publishing house, 2006. [2] K. Akkaya and M. Younis, A survey of routing protocols in wireless sensor networks, Journal of Elsevier Ad Hoc Network, 2005,3(3):325-2349. [3] W. Heinzelman, A. Chandrakasan and H. Balakrishnan, Energy efcient communication protocol for wireless sensor networks, Proceedings of the 33rd Hawaii International Conference System Sciences, 2000: 10-20. [4] Zhang dengyong, Xiong hoaxing and Li feng, Energy efcient improvement upon the LEACH protocol for wireless sensor networks, Journal of changsha college of science and technology, 2007, 4(3): 79-82.

Given the same network energy consumption, the operation time of the EERA algorithm is longer than that of the LEACH algorithm. Moreover, with the use of the EERA algorithm, the increase in energy consumption over time is more stable and the energy consumption is more evenly distributed. It can be seen that even though the average energy consumption of the nodes is higher in LEACH than in EERA, the nodes wont die out very fast during the early periods. As a result, it can be seen from Fig 1 that the death rates among the nodes in the two algorithms are very close by the time point of 200s. However, as more and more events
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[5] Hu gang, Xie dongmei and Wu yuanzhong, Research and improvement upon the LEACH protocol for wireless sensor networks, Sensor technology journal, 2007, 20(6): 1391-1396. [6] K. Sohrabi and G. Pottie, Protocols for self-organization of a wireless sensor network, IEEE Pers. Commun., Oct.2000, 7 (5): 16-27. [7] Guo Bin, Li Zhe and Meng Yan, A Dynamic clustering reactive routing algorithm for wireless sensor networks, Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Communications and Networking in China. Beijing, China: IEEE CS, 2006: 1-6. [8] B. Heinzelman, P. Chandrakasan and H. Balakrishnan, An application specic protocol architecture for wireless microsensor networks, IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications (S1536-1276), 2002, 1(4): 660-670. [9] O.Younis, and S. Fahmy, Distributed clustering in ad-hoc sensor networks: a hybrid energy-efcient approach, Proceedings of IEEE INFOCOM, March 2004: 675-680.

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