An Energy-Efficient Routing Model for Scale-Free Wireless Sensor Networks

Scale-free Networks have surfaced as a significant discovery of network science with a wide application domain. The present paper explores scale-free network theory to design an efficient routing model for Wireless Sensor Networks. A dynamic wireless sensor network where nodes’ degree distribution follows power-law is a Scale-Free Wireless Sensor Network. The evolving nature of Scale-Free Wireless Sensor Networks and huge traffic flow make routing challenging. The paper proposes a hybrid cluster-based Energy Aware Scale-Free (EASF) routing strategy which uses static and dynamic network parameters like node degree, betweenness centrality, and node residual energy for topology generation and routing in a scale-free wireless sensor network. The adaptive nature of the algorithm effectively relocates the load from highly congested nodes to other nodes in the network by using a route evaluation function. The proposed algorithm increases network lifetime by about 33% and 15% and achieves a high clustering coefficient of approximately 37% and 25% higher when compared with Flow Aware Scale Free Model and Local-Area and Energy Efficient Model respectively. The cluster-based forwarding of data packets in EASF helps achieve a smaller increase in average path length with an increase in network size in comparison to FASF and EASF models.