Energy conservation is the main issue in wireless sensor networks. Many existing clustering protocols have been proposed to balance the energy consumption and maximize the battery lifetime of sensor nodes. However, these protocols suffer from the excessive overhead due to repetitive clustering resulting in high-energy consumption. In this paper, we propose energy-aware cluster-based routing protocol (ECRP) in which not only the cluster head (CH) role rotates based on energy around all cluster members until the end of network functioning to avoid frequent re-clustering, but also it can adapt the network topology change. Further, ECRP introduces a multi-hop routing algorithm so that the energy consumption is minimized and balanced. As well, a fault-tolerant mechanism is proposed to cope up with the failure of CHs and relay nodes. We perform extensive simulations on the proposed protocol using different network scenarios. The simulation results demonstrate the superiority of ECRP compared with recent and relevant existing protocols in terms of main performance metrics.

节能是无线传感器网络中的主要问题。已经提出了许多现有的群集协议以平衡能量消耗并最大化传感器节点的电池寿命。但是，这些协议由于重复群集而导致过多的开销，从而导致高能耗。在本文中，我们提出了一种基于能量感知的基于群集的路由协议（ECRP），其中，不仅簇头（CH）角色基于所有簇成员周围的能量进行旋转，直到网络正常运行为止，以避免频繁重新聚类，但它也可以适应网络拓扑的变化。此外，ECRP引入了多跳路由算法，以使能耗最小化并达到平衡。同时，提出了一种容错机制来应对CH和中继节点的故障。我们使用不同的网络场景对建议的协议进行了广泛的仿真。仿真结果表明，在主要性能指标方面，与最近的和相关的现有协议相比，ECRP具有优越性。