An Uneven Cluster-Based Routing Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks
Cheng Li · Chinese Journal of Computers · 2007
Employing clustering techniques in routing protocols can increase the scalability of wireless sensor networks. When cluster heads transmit their data to the data sink via multi-hop communication, the cluster heads closer to the sink are burdened with heavy relay traffic and tend to die early, causing network partitions. This paper presents a novel uneven cluster-based routing protocol for wireless sensor networks. Its core is an Energy-Efficient Uneven Clustering (EEUC) algorithm for network topology organization, in which tentative cluster heads use uneven competition ranges to construct clusters of uneven sizes. The clusters closer to the sink have smaller sizes than those farther away from the sink, thus the cluster heads closer to the sink can preserve some energy for the inter-cluster data forwarding. Simulation results show that the routing protocol effectively balances the energy consumption among cluster heads and achieves an obvious improvement on the network lifetime.