Energy-Efficient Multilevel Clustering in Heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Networks

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Researchers generally believe that nodes in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are 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 WSN and to reduce energy consumption as well, by topology management and routing. HWSNs are very popular in real deployments [1], and have a large area of coverage. In such scenarios, for better connectivity, the need of multilevel clustering protocols arises. In this paper we propose an energy efficient protocol called heterogeneous multilevel clustering and aggregation (HMCA) for HWSNs. We simulate and compare HMCA with existing multilevel clustering protocol EEMC [2] for homogeneous WSN. Simulation results demonstrate that our proposed protocol performs better.