Abstract
Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have grown excessively due to their various applications and low installation cost. In WSN, the main concern is to reduce energy consumption among nodes while maintaining timely and reliable data forwarding. However, most of the existing energy aware routing protocols incur unbalanced energy consumption, which results in inefficient load balancing and compromised network lifetime. Therefore, the main target of this research paper is to present adaptive energy aware cluster-based routing (AECR) protocol for improving energy conservation and data delivery performance. Our proposed AECR protocol differs from other energy efficient routing schemes in some aspects. Firstly, it generates balance sized clusters based on nodes distribution and avoids random clusters formation. Secondly, it optimizes both intra-cluster and inter-cluster routing paths for improving data delivery performance while balancing data traffic on constructed forwarding routes and at the end, in order to reduce the excessive energy consumption and improving load distribution, the role of Cluster Head (CH) is shifted dynamically among nodes by exploit of network conditions. Simulation results demonstrate that AECR protocol outperforms state of the art in terms of various performance metrics.