An Energy-Efficient Multilevel Clustering Algorithm for Heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are generally believed to be homogeneous, but some sensor nodes of higher energy can be used to prolong the lifetime and reliability of WSNs. This gives birth to the concept of Heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Networks (HWSNs). Clustering is an important technique to prolong the lifetime of WSNs and to reduce energy consumption as well, by topology management and routing. HWSNs are popular in real deployments (Corchado et al., 2010), and have a large area of coverage. In such scenarios, for better connectivity, the need for multilevel clustering protocols arises. In this paper, the authors propose an energy-efficient protocol called heterogeneous multilevel clustering and aggregation (HMCA) for HWSNs. HMCA is simulated and compared with existing multilevel clustering protocol EEMC (Jin et al., 2008) for homogeneous WSN. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed protocol performs better.