A modified energy efficient multi-hop routing protocol in wireless sensor networks

Energy efficient routing protocols in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) is an important area of research due to energy limitations. It is therefore important to maximize the limited energy so as to increase the network lifetime of the WSN. In this paper, a modified energy efficient multi-hop routing protocol (mEEMRP) in a 200 m2 field is presented. This protocol is based on a technique that involves balancing load between communication management (CM) nodes during the multi-hop routing of aggregated data to the base station (BS), where the residual energy (RE) levels of CM nodes are considered as well as the distance between neighboring CM nodes. Simulation results showed that mEEMRP yielded a 1.77% improvement over energy efficient multi-hop routing protocol (EEMRP) in terms of network lifetime. More so, the proposed mEEMRP also improved the energy consumption and the number of packets received at the BS by 4.83% and 7.41%, respectively.Keywords: Routing protocol, Multi-hop routing, Network lifetime, mEEMRP, EEMRP