Prolonging the lifetime of wireless sensor networks via unequal clustering

Organizing wireless sensor networks into clusters enables the efficient utilization of the limited energy resources of the deployed sensor nodes. However, the problem of unbalanced energy consumption exists, and it is tightly bound to the role and to the location of a particular node in the network. If the network is organized into heterogeneous clusters, where some more powerful nodes take on the cluster head role to control network operation, it is important to ensure that energy dissipation of these cluster head nodes is balanced. Oftentimes the network is organized into clusters of equal size, but such equal clustering results in an unequal load on the cluster head nodes. Instead, we propose an unequal clustering size (UCS) model for network organization, which can lead to more uniform energy dissipation among the cluster head nodes, thus increasing network lifetime. Also, we expand this approach to homogeneous sensor networks and show that UCS can lead to more uniform energy dissipation in a homogeneous network as well.