Hierarchical Routing Strategy for Wireless Sensor Network

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are designed for a large scale monitoring applications such as military surveillance, medical treatment, environmental monitoring and industry management. In this network, usually hundreds or thousands of low-cost sensor nodes are deployed. These sensing nodes detect the events in the environment and pass an upstream message towards a Sink node. The Sink node is responsible for processing data those are collected by sensor nodes. However, bottleneck exists for WSN: these inner nodes whose positions are close to the Sink node run out of power much earlier than those outer nodes. Because those inner nodes not only perform sensing operation, but also replay data originated from other nodes. In this paper, GAHL routing scheme based on genetic algorithm and Harel method is proposed to solve the problem. The scheme finds the small number of center heads in the network. Those center heads play a role in balancing the workload of inner nodes. With the involvement of center head, a three-tier network is built. From the simulation experiment, the scheme shows a good performance compared to other well-known algorithms. We observe a decrease in the number of center heads, as well as an improvement in the stability of the scheme.