Improving the Lifetime of Clustering-Based Wireless Sensor Networks by Considering the Conditional Dependencies in Inter-Cluster Routing

Abstract

Considering the importance of energy consumption of cluster heads and the impact on the lifetime of cluster heads on the network lifetime, this paper addresses the issue of multi-hop inter-cluster routing. In the procedure proposed by the present study, first some analyses were done demonstrating that selecting the next hop for each cluster head is influenced by selecting the next hops for other cluster heads; therefore, to perform the inter-cluster routing, the dependency between the choices of next hops should be taken into consideration. Afterwards, we apply an evolutionary algorithm that is capable of taking these conditional dependencies into account in finding optimal routes between the cluster heads. In this evolutionary algorithm, the network lifetime is used as the fitness function for evaluating the solutions. The proposed method is evaluated using simulation and is compared to a classic routing method and two methods based on genetic algorithm (which lack the ability to take conditional dependencies into consideration). The results reveal that the proposed method improves the network lifetime.