Energy Efficient Routing Algorithm for WSNs via Unequal Clustering

Clustering and multi-hop forwarding improve the energy efficiency of wireless sensor networks (WSNs). However, when cluster heads transmit their data to a sink via multi-hop communication, nodes around the sink are burdened with heavy relay traffic and tend to die early, which results in the energy hole and network partition problems. In this paper, we propose an energy efficient Unequal-Clustering Routing Algorithm (UCRA) for WSNs, which consists of an Unequal-Clustering Algorithm (UCA) and a multi-hop routing algorithm. Our UCA takes into consideration residual energy and degree of a sensor node when grouping the sensor nodes into unequal clusters. We adopt the Minimum Energy Consumption (MEC) multi-hop routing algorithm for inter-cluster communication. It exploits sensor nodes´ location information to determine a MEC routing path. Simulation results show that our UCRA balances the energy consumption among sensor nodes and achieve a substantial improvement on the network lifetime.