An energy-aware routing protocol for wireless sensor network based on genetic algorithm

Energy saving and effective utilization are an essential issue for wireless sensor network. Most previous cluster based routing protocols only care the relationship of cluster heads and sensor nodes but ignore the huge difference costs between them. In this paper, we present a routing protocol based on genetic algorithm for a middle layer oriented network in which the network consists of several stations that are responsible for receiving data and forwarding the data to the sink. The amount of stations should be not too many and not too few. Both cases will cause either too much construction cost or extra transmission energy consumption. We implement five methods to compare the performance and test the stability of our presented methods. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed scheme reduces the amount of stations by 36.8 and 20% compared with FF and HL in 100-node network. Furthermore, three methods are introduced to improve our proposed scheme for effective cope with the expansion of network scale problem.