HSCR: Hierarchical structured cluster routing protocol for load balanced wireless sensor networks

The robustness of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) has made it a preferred choice for many applications. WSNs should perform the intended sensing task with a limited amount of energy. Clustering methodology is used to reduce sensor nodes' energy consumption and increase the network lifetime by organizing nodes into independent groups. In this article, a hierarchical structured cluster routing (HSCR) protocol based on the principle of an m-way balanced tree has been proposed for multi-hop intra-cluster communication and offload the cluster head. It enhances the network performance by providing an underlying architecture that reduces the intra-cluster communication distance and the amount of data sent to the cluster head. In the proposed HSCR protocol, an m-way tree-based hierarchical structure has been proposed in which balanced structure is formed within each cluster so that data aggregation is performed at each intermediate parent node. The proposed approach can be implemented over any communication protocol used in WSNs. Simulation results prove that the proposed algorithms outperform traditional clustering algorithms, LEACH and CT-RPL, in terms of network stability, energy consumption, and network lifetime. Simulation results affirm that the proposed algorithms outperform traditional clustering algorithms, LEACH and CT-RPL, in terms of network stability, energy consumption, average intra-cluster communication distance and network lifetime by 105.32%, 49.23%, 14.98%, 109.31%, and 35.75%, 15.32%, 17%, 24.31%, respectively.