A grid based clustering and routing algorithm for solving hot spot problem in wireless sensor networks

Energy conservation of the sensor nodes is the most important issue that has been studied extensively in the design of wireless sensor networks (WSNs). In many applications, the nodes closer to the sink are overburdened with huge traffic load as the data from the entire region are forwarded through them to reach the sink. As a result, their energy gets exhausted quickly and the network is partitioned. This is commonly known as hot spot problem. Moreover, sensor nodes are prone to failure due to several factors such as environmental hazards, battery exhaustion, hardware damage and so on. However, failure of cluster heads (CHs) in a two tire WSN is more perilous. Therefore, apart from energy efficiency, any clustering or routing algorithm has to cope with fault tolerance of CHs. In this paper, we address the hot spot problem and propose grid based clustering and routing algorithms, combinedly called GFTCRA (grid based fault tolerant clustering and routing algorithms) which takes care the failure of the CHs. The algorithms follow distributed approach. We also present a distributed run time management for all member sensor nodes of any cluster in case of failure of their CHs. The routing algorithm is also shown to tolerate the sudden failure of the CHs. The algorithms are tested through simulation with various scenarios of WSN and the simulation results show that the proposed method performs better than two other grid based algorithms in terms of network lifetime, energy consumption and number of dead sensor nodes.