Most of the existing routing protocols designed for EH-WSNs (energy harvesting wireless sensor network) are competition-based so they use multiple criteria for CH selection.
To provide balanced energy utilization, factors such as residual energy, distance to BS, adjacency degree, energy harvesting rate were considered and in some protocols even link statistics were included because they help us use a better link to reduce the link loss and ensure the reliability of data transmission.
Especially, in data transmission phase, a transmission power adjustment scheme was introduced to use harvested energy more efficiently. However, in overall operation stages including CH selection, next-hop CH selection and joining CMs to CH, multiple criteria that reflect the property of each node were not used. This resulted in unbalanced utilization of harvested energy.
Also, transmission power adjustment for lengthening the transmission distance was applied only when the rechargeable battery is nearly charged, so it left the possibility to further increase the utilization of the harvested energy.
Especially, energy consumed for sensing was ignored in designing routing protocols under the consideration that it is much less than that consumed for transmission and reception.
To solve the problems above, Ri Man Gun, an institute head at the Faculty of Communications, has proposed a novel improved equal hierarchical cluster-based routing protocol to enhance balanced utilization of the harvested energy as well as to ensure the reliability of communication and the network connectivity.
You can find more information about this in his paper “An Improved Equal Hierarchical Cluster-based Routing Protocol for EH-WSNs to Enhance Balanced Utilization of Harvested Energy” in “IEEE Access” (SCI).
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