PRODUCE: A Probability-Driven Unequal Clustering Mechanism for Wireless Sensor Networks

There has been proliferation of research on seeking for distributing the energy consumption among nodes in each cluster and between cluster heads to extend the network lifetime. However, they hardly consider the hot spots problem caused by heavy relay traffic forwarded. In this paper, we propose a distributed and randomized clustering algorithm that consists of unequal sized clusters. The cluster heads closer to the base station may focus more on inter-cluster communication while distant cluster heads concentrate more on intra-cluster communication. As a result, it nearly guarantees no communication in the network gets excessively long communication distance that significantly attenuates signal strength. Simulation results show that our algorithm achieves abundant improvement in terms of the coverage time and network lifetime, especially when the density of distributed nodes is high.