Level and Cluster Based Routing for Wireless Sensor Network

This paper proposes a level and cluster based routing approach for a wireless sensor network. Nodes in the network are divided into several levels according to their hops to sink node. Every sensor node has a level number. Using level information, a sensor node can send messages to a sink node in a more efficient way, and a sink node can easily locate other sensor nodes. To make network more balanced, the paper introduces a cluster method, which splits nodes in the same level into different clusters, and chooses a cluster head for every cluster, to switch nodes in the cluster to work in turn. Unlike all other cluster routing methods, a cluster head node takes schedule jobs of sensor nodes in the cluster according to their energy left, instead of sensing. The paper also presents several algorithms for constructing a wireless sensor network, querying and scheduling. The simulation experiment shows that the scalability of our method is approximately linear.