An Energy Optimized Unequal Clustering Routing Protocol in Wireless Sensor Networks

Energy conservation of sensors in wireless network is very important since the battery of a sensor node cannot be replaced. In this paper, we propose an energy efficient base station assisted routing protocol in wireless sensor network, named EOUCR, which uses the base station to control the overhead of sensor nodes and create clusters of sensors. Main idea of BSAH is based on the concept of UCR, which groups the nodes into clusters of unequal sizes. Cluster heads closer to the base station have smaller cluster sizes than those farther from the base station, thus they can reserve some energy for the inter-cluster data forwarding. EOUCR combines the benefit of several clustering schemes to maximize the lifetime of sensor nodes and introduces several new features to enhance the performance of sensors. We compare the performance of BSAH with HEED, BCDCP and UCR and the simulation results show that EOUCR achieves a good improvement on network lifetime.