Title: A new unequal clustering protocol with local re-clustering mechanism for wireless sensor networks

Authors: Hao Tang; Wei Hong; Lei Zhou; Gangzhong Miao

Addresses: School of Electrical Engineering and Automation; School of Computer and Information, Hefei University of Technology, Hefei 230009, China ' School of Computer and Information, Hefei University of Technology, Hefei 230009, China ' School of Computer and Information, Hefei University of Technology, Hefei 230009, China ' School of Electrical Engineering and Automation, Hefei University of Technology, Hefei 230009, China

Abstract: A new unequal clustering protocol with local re-clustering mechanism is proposed to mitigate the 'hot spot' problem and thereby prolong the network lifetime of a wireless sensor network (WSN). In the setup phase, the network is partitioned into several unequal-size layers based on the minimum hop count of each node to the base station (BS). Then each layer is further partitioned into several layer-dependent-size clusters by a weight-based cluster head (CH) competition, where candidate nodes participating in CH election are selected by the BS with a new exploration approach. In addition, we propose a local re-clustering mechanism to further mitigate the uneven energy load during the data transmission phase, that is, different layers reselect their CHs at different frequencies according to their relative distances to the BS. Furthermore, for local re-clustering, a simplified CH rotation approach is proposed to lessen the communication and computation overhead. The simulation results demonstrate that our proposed protocol is effective in prolonging the network lifetime and in balancing the energy consumption.

Keywords: wireless sensor networks; WSNs; unequal clustering; local re-clustering; cluster head rotation; exploration; hot spots; network lifetime; simulation; energy consumption.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCSE.2016.076935

International Journal of Computational Science and Engineering, 2016 Vol.12 No.4, pp.276 - 286

Received: 25 Jan 2013
Accepted: 18 Mar 2013
Published online: 08 Jun 2016 *

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