Nonuniform clustering routing protocol for tunnel wireless sensor network in underground mine

Wireless sensor networks(WSNs) are very important for monitoring underground mine safety. Aimed at the characteristics of structure of the tunnel in underground mine, the tunnel wireless sensor network (TWSN) is presented to monitor the tunnel. TWSN has the unbalanced communication load which leads to early invalidation of nodes close to the base station. The nonuniform clustering algorithm for TWSN can solve this problem. In our study, the method of nonuniform clustering region demarcation in tunnel is discussed theoretically and the nonuniform clustering routing protocol for TWSN is introduced. Simulation results show that the nonuniform clustering routing protocol for TWSN effectively balances the load among nodes and achieves an obvious improvement on the network lifetime compared with uniform clustering and no clustering TWSN.