Energy Efficient Relay Selection Method for Clustered Wireless Sensor Network

In the literature, cooperative relay selection methods are proposed for wireless sensor networks (WSNs) taking into account the characteristics of those networks, in terms of energy consumption. However, to ensure the cluster heads (CHs) have variety of relay candidates without adding extra signaling that yield to additional energy consumption, a relay selection method at the destination is proposed for clustered WSNs. The basic of the novel method is selecting the relay with the optimal location from virtual circular clusters defined at the Sink. As a result, the Sink chooses the relay with minimum two link path length, which minimizes the total energy cost per transmission. Simulation results are presented for different transmission ranges and the performance of the proposed method is evaluated in terms of energy cost per bit, total energy cost and the network lifetime. Results show that the proposed method outperforms the random relay selection method, conventional multi-hop transmission in terms of energy efficiency.