An Efficient Distance-Energy-based Minimum Spanning Tree (DE-MST) for Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

The sensor nodes used in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) perform close-range sensing in any environment and are compact, battery-powered, light-weight devices. The overall network performance depends on the routing protocols in the network layer and the flow control protocols at the data link layer. This study proposes a novel routing protocol by adapting the Minimum Spanning Tree (MST), Low-Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy (LEACH), and Clustering with One-Time Setup (COTS) to save energy and maximize the network life time and reduce the network delay. The intercluster communication among Cluster Heads (CH) has been proposed based on the Distance Energy-based MST (DE-MST) technique and a novel pipelining technique was introduced for effective channel utilization. Simulations showed an improvement over LEACH, MST-based clustering, and COTS techniques by this method.