Affiliations:
School of Information and Electrical Engineering, China University of Mining and Technology, Xuzhou, China
Correspondence:
[*]
Corresponding author. Jiansheng Qian, School of Information and Electrical Engineering, China University of Mining and Technology, No1, Daxue Road, Xuzhou, Jiangsu 221116, China. E-mail: qianjsh@cumt.edu.cn.
Abstract: Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are envisioned for a number of application scenarios. However, the few focus on the features of a specific system, and rarely report about the characteristics of the target environment. This article presents an unequal clustering and cross-layer routing protocol for environmental monitoring based on WSNs under coal mine laneway. Considering the long and narrow structure of the road tunnels, a chain-type topology is developed to achieve an application-aware system. In order to improve the performance and prolong the lifetime of the network, an energy balancing strategy is deployed in the cluster head nodes. The mechanism of unbalanced energy exhaustion among cluster heads in the whole network is theoretically analyzed, and the effective density function (ρ (x)) is calculated, which is used for cluster head election in order to make the distribution density of cluster heads correspond to. In addition, a cross-layer routing algorithm is presented, which considers routing and MAC layers information to reduce the congestion, increase the packet delivery ratio, and minimize the energy usage. Simulations show that the proposed scheme outperforms other algorithms in terms of energy balance of average node, prolonging the network lifetime and better network throughput.
Keywords: Energy balancing, unequal clustering, distribution density of cluster heads, cross-layer routing
