The discovery and the use of many wireless
technologies are paving way for new remote monitoring
applications. The sensing devices are becoming popular because
of their flexibility, performance, low cost and portability. Wireless
Sensor Networks (WSN) is a good alternative to wired systems
because of easy deployment in remote areas. Wireless Sensor
Networks are used in different domains for various applications
because of their salient characteristics like reduced power
consumption, scalability, ability to respond immediately within a
short span of time, reliability, dynamic in nature, low cost and
easy installation. The main objective of this paper work is to find
a suitable energy efficient, scalable and reliable communication
protocols for intra-cluster and intercluster communication.
Therefore the proposed research work follows three different
phases. To achieve the desired results, the proposed research
work concentrates on three protocols namely Energy Efficient
and Reliable Clustering Routing Protocol (EERCRP), Energy
Efficient and Reliable MAC Protocol (EERMAC) and Energy
Efficient and Reliable Hybrid Transport Protocol
(EERHTP).EERCRP and EERMAC are intra-cluster
communication protocols that help in cluster formation and
effective data sensing. EERHTP is a transport layer protocol that
is used for inter-cluster communication. All the above protocols
are evaluated using network simulator NS2 for their performance
analysis. EERCRP is compared with PASCC and PCDCC which
from the root level header node are existing congestion and
queue based hybrid clustering protocols. The proposed EERCRP
follows hierarchical cluster formation where the leader node is
selected based on queue length, residual energy of the node and
distance. It is efficient than the existing methods in terms of
energy and reliability metrics.EERMAC is compared with
existing MAC protocols namely SMAC, IEEE 802.11 EDCA and
EA-MAC. SMAC follows traditional TDMA or CSMA method of
data access. They are suitable only for periodic data sensing. The
proposed EERMAC allows hybrid data sensing consisting of both
periodic and event based data which are classified using priority
levels. Event based data is assigned higher priority than periodic
data. Queues are used for storing both types of data using various
levels of threshold values. EERMAC uses CSMA/CA method for
event based data. Variable TDMA method is used for event based
and periodic data. EERHTP is a transport layer protocol that
uses two types of reliability models namely ACK and NACK
depending on the type of data. All the three protocols are
evaluated both for energy and reliability metrics such as total
energy consumption, residual energy comparison, energy
consumption per packet, packet delivery ratio, delay, packet drop,
jitter, throughput and network routing overhead. Thus it is
concluded that all the three protocols are more optimal than the
existing protocols and prove to be the best protocols for
intracluster and inter-cluster communications.