Maximum bottleneck energy routing (MBER) — An energy efficient routing method for wireless sensor networks

Wireless Sensor Networks need energy efficient protocols for communication and data fusion to consolidate data and prolong the lifetime of the network. In this paper, an adaptive hierarchical clustering and routing method has been proposed. This clustering and routing method is based on maximum bottleneck energy routing (MBER) from a node to the sink. This method favors the routes with the highest energy instead of the neighboring node with the highest energy. MBER minimizes the possibility of a node dying in the route of sending a packet to the sink. Due to MBER's hierarchical structure, data fusion can be applied in different forms and at different levels to send more data from each node to the sink, depending on the application. It can be adapted to varying transmission ranges for communication among nodes. Compared to some of the well-known protocols in the field MBER's results show that it outperforms them in terms of the overall lifetime of the network and the number of packets sent to the sink.