Abstract
Graph coloring was exploited in wireless sensor networks to solve many optimization problems. These problems are related in general to channel assignment. In this paper, we propose to jointly use coloring for routing purposes. We introduce CHRA a coloring based hierarchical routing approach. Coloring is exploited to avoid interferences and also to schedule nodes transmissions to sink. We provide an analytical and experimental study assessing the performance of CHRA in terms of end-to-end delay and energy consumption. In particular, we find that CHRA performs better than LEACH, a well established hierarchical routing protocol.