An Energy Efficient Regional Partitioned Clustering Routing Algorithm for Wireless Sensor Networks

In Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN), one of the key issues to consider is low power consumption. Considering the characteristic of limited energy of sensor nodes, an energy efficient regional partitioned clustering routing algorithm (RPCR) is proposed in this paper. To resolve the problem that the clusters distribute unevenly in the networks, the whole network is compartmentalized to several regions through the initialization and partition algorithm. In the first round, through timing mechanism the sensor node nearest to the region center in each region is selected as the cluster head (CH) and other non-CH nodes in the region become the member nodes. Each CH node maintains a member node list and when a round finishes it selects the member node with the highest energy as the new CH for the next round. Simulation results show that our algorithm can make the clusters distribute evenly in the networks and provide higher performance in energy conservation and networks lifetime extension compared with the well known cluster-based protocol LEACH.