Abstract
Graph coloring was exploited in wireless sensor networks to solve many optimization problems, mainly related to channel assignment. In this paper, we propose to use coloring to jointly manage channel access and routing to the sink. We introduce CHRA, a coloring based hierarchical routing approach. Coloring is exploited to avoid interferences and also to schedule nodes transmissions to the sink. We provide an analytical study assessing the performance of CHRA and present an investigation of various coloring heuristics to study their impact on CHRA performances on maintaining the network connectivity and coverage, while reducing the energy consumption.