XIAO CHEN, MINGWEI XU, YONG CUI
Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University Beijing 100084, P. R. China E-mail: {csun, xmw, cy}@csnet1.cs.tsinghua.edu.c

A wireless sensor network (WSN) consisting of a large number of micro-sensors with low-power transceivers can be an effective tool for data-gathering in various environments. The energy constraint is the main challenge the WSN faces. Focusing on the characteristics of routing in WSN, we propose a novel Robust Cluster-based Multi-hop routing algorithm (RCM) that can save energy remarkably. The algorithm adaptively organizes sensors to multiple clusters, where each cluster includes a header and several members. The member takes charge of data collection and communication with header; while the header carries out data fusion and forwards the packet to the sink at cluster granularity. Furthermore, dynamic header rotation and node fail-to-resume mechanisms could balance the energy cost on every node and improve the robustness so as to prolong the lifetime of network. The simulation in ns2 demonstrates the advantages of the algorithm including energy efficiency, scalability and robustness.