Abstract
Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) differ from traditional wireless communication networks in several characteristics. One of them is the power awareness since the batteries of sensor nodes have a restricted lifetime and are difficult to be replaced. Therefore, all protocols must be designed to minimize energy consumption and to preserve the longevity of the network. Routing protocols in WSN aim at accomplishing power conservation. Most of researches have focused on energy efficient solutions regardless of the communication between Cluster Heads (CH) and Base Station (BS). When the sensor field is far away from the BS, the CH are burdened with heavier relay traffic and tend to die much faster. To solve this problem, a Multi-hop Energy Efficient routing protocol based on Data Controlling (MEEDC) is proposed in this paper. Our work focuses on (i) a heterogeneous network and (ii) a sensitive data controlling. The role of super nodes in the proposed heterogeneous network is to connect the CH and the BS. They are responsible for transmitting packets received from the CH to the BS, thus the CH can preserve some energy in data forwarding. The control of data transmission tries to reduce the number of transmissions and thus considerable energy conservation is achieved. Simulation results show that the MEEDC protocol significantly prolongs the network survival time.