Energy-efficient unequal chain length clustering for WSN

Abstract

In WSN, sensor nodes deployed with a large number in remotely unattended sensing environment. In such networks, sensor nodes have a limitation in their capabilities such energy, where nodes deployed without constant power supply. In such environments, the network is no longer useful when the battery dies, which will effect on performance, quality of sensor network and in turn, human lives that can be saved. Many clustering protocols have been proposed to improve the energy consumption and the network lifetime. However, a heavy burden that the cluster head bears during intra-cluster and inter-cluster processing is still high, hence cluster head consumes more energy comparing to non-cluster head nodes. So due to power restriction of sensor nodes and cluster head overloads problem; designing a routing protocol that minimizes energy consumption for each node and maximizes the network lifetime is considered a very important issue. In order to overcome such limitations, in this paper, we propose an Energy Efficient Unequal Chain Length Clustering (EEUCLC) protocol which has a suboptimal multi-hop routing algorithm to reduce the burden on the cluster head and a probability-based cluster head selection algorithm to prolong the network lifetime. Simulation results show that the EEUCLC mechanism enhanced the energy balance and prolonged the network lifetime compared to other related protocols.