Energy Efficient Unequal Clustering Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

A wireless sensor networks (WSNs) can be represented as a set of many nodes with low power communication capability. The nodes are deployed in a large physical space to collect the physical phenomenon and report to the base station (BS). Self-organization is a typical design issue caused by random deployment and unattended operations. The sensor nodes are constrained in energy, memory and processing because of small size and cost. The sensor nodes senses, collects, process and forward data to the BS. The sensing, processing and forwarding processes must be designed in such a way to conserve the limited energy resource of the sensor nodes. The clustering the WSN is proven to be an energy efficient technique to enhance the network lifetime and also provides scalable and resource efficient solutions. In this paper, an energy efficient unequal clustering protocol (UCBR) is proposed to extend the lifetime of the sensor nodes. The network is divided into unequal clusters, the clusters near to BS have small size and the farther clusters are larger in size. The unequal clustering helps in distributing the energy load uniformly among the cluster heads (CHs). The protocol addresses the hot spot problem well with unequal clustering and contributes much towards network longevity.