Employing Orphan Nodes to Avoid Energy Holes in Wireless Sensor Networks

When energy consumption by wireless sensor nodes gets off balance, partitions in the network appear because several of the nodes stop functioning. The respective network’s lifetime also diminishes. This problem is commonly known as the “hot spot” or “energy hole” phenomenon. To resolve this issue, a Multi-Hop Decentralized Cluster-Based Routing (MDCR) protocol is proposed. This algorithm uses orphan nodes as intermediate nodes to form inter-cluster multi-hop routing and balance the energy consumption among sensor nodes. Simulation experiments have shown that MDCR is significantly better at prolonging network lifetime compared to the Adaptive Decentralized Re-Clustering Protocol.