An Energy Centric Hierarchical Opportunistic Cognitive Routing Protocol for Reliable and Energy Efficient Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) play a vital role in Internet of Things (IoT) applications such as smart cities, healthcare, agriculture, and industrial monitoring, where energy efficiency and reliable communication are critical challenges due to limited sensor node resources. Existing routing and clustering methods often suffer from high energy consumption, routing overhead, poor adaptability, and reduced scalability under dynamic network conditions. To address these issues, this paper proposes an Energy-Centric Hierarchical Opportunistic Routing Cognitive Protocol (ECHO-RC) for energy-efficient and reliable communication in WSNs. The main objective of the proposed framework is to improve network lifetime, packet delivery reliability, throughput, and spectrum utilization while minimizing delay and energy consumption. ECHO-RC integrates hierarchical clustering, opportunistic routing, cognitive spectrum awareness and utility-based adaptive decision making using residual energy, link quality and channel availability metrics for optimal cluster head and forwarding node selection. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed ECHO-RC protocol achieves superior performance with a network lifetime of 1250 rounds, low energy consumption of 0.42 J, high packet delivery ratio of 96%, throughput of 310 kbps, and reduced delay of 118 ms compared with existing methods. The results confirm that ECHO-RC effectively enhances communication reliability, energy optimization, and overall network efficiency in dynamic WSN and IoT environments.