Efficient multilevel clustering for large-scale heterogeneous wireless sensor networks

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Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) do not always have sensor nodes of same type. In other words, WSNs are not always homogeneous, but some sensor nodes of higher energy can be used to prolong the lifetime and reliability of WSNs. Heterogeneous wireless sensor networks (HWSNs) have some sensor nodes of relatively higher energy. HWSNs are very useful in real life deployments and have a large area of coverage. Clustering is considered to be an important technique to prolong the lifetime of WSN. Clustering also reduces the energy consumption by topology management and routing. In large-scale and real life deployments of wireless sensor networks, multilevel clustering is paramount for better connectivity and coverage. In this paper we propose an energy efficient multilevel clustering protocol for HWSNs. We simulate and compare our proposed protocol with existing multilevel clustering protocol EEMC for homogeneous WSN. Simulation results demonstrate that our proposed protocol outperforms EEMC.