Reliable and Energy Efficient Communication Algorithm in Hierarchical Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks are data centric networks, which transmit gathered data to sink nodes. Considering energy constraints, how to make full use of the limited energy to reliably transmit data as much as possible becomes a main research region in sensor networks. In this paper, we focus on energy consumption and reliability of different communication modes. Single hop communication mode is simple and easy to implement, but the distant cluster members, especially those on the edge of the networks, need to enlarge transmission power. On the other hand multi-hop communication is not constrained by the communication distance. The relay communication mode guarantees data transmission to a remote cluster head. Considering of the reliability and energy consumption, we propose a voting based clustering communication algorithm. And the optimal cluster number is calculated based on the geometry locations. Finally, several experiments have been done to validate the analysis in this paper.