Energy Neutral Hierarchical Routing Protocol for Energy Harvesting Wireless Sensor Network

Abstract: providing network-wide energy neutral operation for wireless sensor nodes with energy harvesting capabilities is possible if and only if the amount of energy consumed by the nodes is no more than the amount of energy harvested in a certain period of time. In this paper, we propose an Energy Neutral LEACH routing protocol which is an extension to the traditional LEACH protocol that group energy harvesting sensors into a number of clusters that ensures the energy neutral status of all sensors via inter and intra-cluster communications. The main idea of our proposed protocol consists of using Gateway node in each cluster so as to reduce the data transmission ranges of cluster head nodes. Simulation results show that our proposed routing protocol achieves a higher throughput and ensured the energy neutral status of the whole network.