Energy-aware Unequal Clustering Routing Protocol For Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks,the convergence of sensor technology,micro-electro-mechanical systems technology,wireless communications,distributed information processing and embedded computing,can cooperate and run real time detection,sensing and collecting information of the phenomenon,and then process,send it to the end user.Wireless sensor networks is attracting more and more researchers' interest and becoming one of the hottest research areas.A typical wireless sensor network is composed of a large number of low-cost sensor nodes, which are densely deployed either inside the phenomenon or very close to it.Sensor nodes usually transmit collected data to the sink by multihop communication using wireless medium. Every node must possess the self-organizing ability and work as a router in traditional computer network.The number of senor nodes is larger,and each node has limited resource,so saving energy and prolonging the lifetime of the network is the first objective of the routing protocols.The technology of routing protocol is one of the most important technologies.This paper researches the technical characteristics and design targets,and then discusses the evaluation criterions.Routing protocols are divided into flat routing protocols and hierarchy ones,and then several typical routing protocols are introduced.Generally,clustering routing protocols use random clustering and cluster-head shifting strategy,which can reduce the nodes communicating with sink node,thereby save energy of the nodes;and also can shift the cluster-head among the cluster members,balancing the energy consumption inside the cluster and prolonging the lifetime of the networks.This paper analyses the problems of traditional clustering protocols,such as unbalancing energy consumption among clusters and problem of cluster-head shifting.In order to resolve these problems,unequal clustering and cluster-head shifting mechanism based on energy threshold are introduced.And then Energy-aware Unequal Clustering Routing Protocol(EUCRP) for wireless sensor networks is proposed.Subsequently,the basic theory and details of EUCRP are discussed.In the end,EUCRP is implemented on NS2 platform.Simulation experiments are made to compare and analyze the performance of EUCRP and LEACH by the total energy consumption of the networks and the percentage of nodes alive.The result of the experiments prove that,in EUCRP,the performance of energy balancing are better than that in LEACH,so EUCRP can prolong the lifetime of the network despite of higher total energy consumption.