Energy balanced TCMR protocol in wireless sensor networks

Adaptive clustering is one of the common methods in wireless sensor networks to prolong the network lifetime. Single-hop dynamic clustering proposed in LEACH protocol is simple and energy-efficient. By random clustering, it causes uneven energy consumption and terrible energy consumption when sink node is far away from the network. We develop a protocol called TCMR (Twice Clustering and Multi-hop Routing) in this paper. Considering average residual energy, twice clustering for data aggregation has been applied at cluster formation with an adaptive threshold, which results in the balanced load. Multi-hop routing is employed in order to solve the problem of uneven energy dissipation at the phase of data transmission. A shortest multi hop route is developed to form sink node. TCMR is simulated by NS2, it is shown by the results that the network lifetime has increased from 451 seconds in LEACH to 1000 seconds in TCMR. And the ratios of the number of first die nodes and last die nodes between TCMR and LEACH are 959% and 161% respectively.