Energy-efficient steady clustering routing protocol for wireless sensor networks

An energy-efficient steady clustering(EESC) routing protocol is proposed in order to solve the problem of limited energy supply and unbalanced energy consumption for wireless sensor networks.In the clustering mechanism,the current cluster heads determine cluster heads for next round according to residual energy of cluster member nodes.In the next round,each non-cluster head node decides which cluster head it will belong to according to energy-distance function.The communication model of single hop or multi-hop that cluster heads select to send data to base station is decided according to the criterion of minimum energy consumption.In EESC routing protocol,the number of cluster heads generated in each round is very steady.And EESC routing protocol combines the advantage of both distributed and centralized clustering protocols.Experimental results show that the proposed routing protocol not only efficiently uses the limited energy of network nodes,but also balances the energy consumption of all nodes,and significantly prolongs the network lifetime.