Citation: Pedditi, R.B.; Debasis, K.
Energy Efficient Routing Protocol for
an IoT-Based WSN System to Detect
Forest Fires. Appl. Sci. 2023, 13, 3026.
https://doi.org/10.3390/
app13053026
Academic Editor: Alessandro Lo
Schiavo
Received: 5 January 2023
Revised: 21 February 2023
Accepted: 24 February 2023
Published: 27 February 2023
Copyright: © 2023 by the authors.
Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.
This article is an open access article
distributed under the terms and
conditions of the Creative Commons
Attribution (CC BY) license (https://
creativecommons.org/licenses/by/
4.0/).
Article
Energy Efficient Routing Protocol for an IoT-Based WSN
System to Detect Forest Fires
Ramesh Babu Pedditi and Kumar Debasis *
School of Computer Science and Engineering, VIT-AP University, Amaravati 522237, India
* Correspondence: kumar.debasis@vitap.ac.in
Abstract:
Around a third of the world’s surface area is covered with forests. This is about 4–5 billion
hectares of land. We are losing an additional 3 million hectares of forest cover each year than we did
in 2001. Hence, researchers worldwide have been working on the identification and prevention of
forest fires more aggressively. The wireless sensor network technology for forest fire detection was
established as a result of the shortcomings of standard forest fire detection techniques in real time.
This paper proposes an energy-aware Internet of Things (IoT) based Wireless Sensor Network (WSN)
model with an efficient clustering and routing technique for forest fire detection. The proposed model
is named Energy Efficient Routing Protocol (EERP). The model decreases the energy utilization in
sensor nodes by minimizing idle listening in cluster heads. EERP also minimizes the transmission of
redundant data by allowing only the sensor nodes close to an event to report the event. Furthermore,
the model ensures that sensor nodes with low energy levels do not become cluster heads. EERP uses
multi-hop routes to send data from source nodes to the Base Station. The performance of EERP is
compared with that of some existing Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols in various scenarios.
The simulation results prove that the proposed model reduces energy consumption in sensor nodes
significantly.
Keywords:
wireless sensor network; time division multiple access; forest fire detection; energy
conservation; clustering; Internet of Things
1. Introduction
A wireless sensor network (WSN) is a network of wireless sensor devices that work
in a coordinated way and communicate their readings to a base station. Each device
is powered by a battery with a limited energy supply [
1
]. Furthermore, these devices
have low computation power, and limited sensing and transmission range. The energy
stored in the battery of a node determines the lifespan of the node. The stored energy is
used for various node operations such as sensing, processing, and communication. The
batteries in sensor nodes are small and usually cannot be replaced or recharged. There
are various energy harvesting methods, but they cannot eliminate the need for energy
management. Hence, the most challenging job is the organization of the limited battery
power by using energy-efficient hardware and software protocols for WSNs [
2
]. Some of the
popular applications of WSNs are surveillance in the military, remote patient monitoring
in healthcare, measurement of environmental temperature, humidity, and air pressure,
crop monitoring in agriculture, monitoring machines in industries, etc. [
3
]. The following
are the design challenges in WSNs: energy conservation, scalability, localization, security,
routing, etc. As sensor nodes are standalone devices that completely depend on their
batteries to carry out all activities, many researchers have been working on energy-efficient
clustering and routing techniques to reduce energy consumption in sensor nodes. In the
work proposed in [
4
], the authors assessed each node’s centrality, energy surplus, and
temperature to choose the best cluster head. In [
5
], the authors proposed a priority-based
energy-efficient routing protocol for low-power and lossy networks.
Appl. Sci. 2023, 13, 3026. https://doi.org/10.3390/app13053026 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/applsci
