Routing and Clustering of Sensor Nodes in the Honeycomb Architecture

Abstract

Energy is the most valuable resource in wireless sensor networks; this resource is limited and much in demand during routing and communication between sensor nodes. Hierarchy structuring of the network into clusters allows reducing the energy consumption by using small distance transmissions within clusters in a multihop manner. In this article, we choose to use a hybrid routing protocol named Efficient Honeycomb Clustering Algorithm (EHCA), which is at the same time hierarchical and geographical protocol by using honeycomb clustering. This kind of clustering guarantees the balancing of the energy consumption through changing in each round the location of the cluster head, which is in a given vertex of the honeycomb cluster. The combination of geographical and hierarchical routing with the use of honeycomb clustering has proved its efficiency; the performances of our protocol outperform the existing protocols in terms of the number of nodes alive, the latency of data delivery, and the percentage of successful data delivery to the sinks. The simulations testify the superiority of our protocol against the existing geographical and hierarchical protocols.