An Improved Multi-hop Routing Protocol in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) routing protocols is a research area in the field of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) that is receiving tremendous attention. This is due to the unique nature of WSNs. A WSN usually has several resource constraints. Routing protocols in WSN ought to cater for these constraints in a bid to utilize the limited resources maximally. One of such constraints is limited energy of the sensor nodes (SNs). Researchers are therefore burdened with developing new routing protocols, modifying existing routing protocols as well as developing hybrid protocols. This research paper presents an improved multi-hop routing protocol (IMRP) in WSNs. The protocol seeks to address the distribution of energy levels among functional nodes during the routing of data to a designated Base Station (BS). This is achieved by considering transmission distance as well as the energy level of functional nodes. A functional node having sufficient energy and located within a coverage threshold is selected as the next hop along the multi-hop routing path. This protocol was implemented on a 400m2 field. Simulation results showed significant improvement of 10.65%, 9.2% and 12.5% in terms of node death percentage, energy consumption percentage and number of packets received at the Base Station (BS) respectively over the energy efficient multi-hop routing protocol (EEMRP).