A Study on Existing Protocols and Energy-Balanced Routing Protocol for Data Gathering in Wireless Sensor Networks

Energy is an extremely critical resource for battery-powered wireless sensor networks (WSN), thus making energy-efficient protocol design a key challenging problem. Most of the existing energy-efficient routing protocols always forward packets along the minimum energy path to the sink to merely minimize energy consumption, which causes an unbalanced distribution of forming residue energy among sensor nodes, and eventually results in a network partition. In this paper, with the help of the concept of potential in physics, we design an Energy-Balanced Routing Protocol (EBRP) by constructing a mixed virtual potential field in terms of depth, energy density, and residual energy. The goal of this basic approach is to force packets to move toward the sink through the dense energy area to protect the nodes with relatively low residual energy. To address the routing loop problem emerging in this basic algorithm, enhanced mechanisms are proposed to detect and eliminate loops. The basic algorithm and loop elimination mechanism are first validated through extensive simulation experiments.?