Information-aware collaborative routing in wireless sensor network

In this paper, we propose a new approach to routing protocol called information-aware collaborative routing for wireless sensor networks. Clustering and local data aggregation schemes have been developed to reduce the energy for transmitting redundant data in the wireless sensor network. Most existing approaches have been developed for the cases when there is direct communication between cluster head and base station. Even though these schemes are able to reduce data redundancy to be transmitted from the cluster heads to the base station, they have not exploited the data redundancy between neighboring clusters. In this research, we study a more general case when there are multi-hop communications from cluster heads to the base station. To exploit the potential redundancy between neighboring clusters, we propose to develop a routing protocol architecture that combines multi-hop routing with information-aware clustering based on the correlation of sensor data. The information-aware collaborative routing includes the re-clustering based on data correlation as well as the central-controlled clustering and cluster heads rotation to evenly distribute the energy load in the entire network. Extensive simulations show that the proposed information-aware collaborative routing can achieve better performance in terms of longer network lifetime and less energy dissipation comparing with the existing cluster-based routing.