A Non-uniform Clustering Routing Protocol For Wireless Sensor Networks

The development of Micro-Electro-Mechanism, wireless communication technology and computing technology have deeply promote development of wireless sensor networks(WSNs) which is a new technology and has become a hot research area because of its widely prospect of application. The WSNs consists of a large amount of sensors deployed in the monitor environment. The sensors form a network by self-organization and sense, gather and deal the data cooperatively and then send the data to the visitor. Sensor, sensed object and visitor are the three main factors of WSNs. Because of the number of sensors in network is very large and the energy of them is limited, Designing a efficient routing algorithm which can make use of the energy efficiently to prolong the lifetime of the network becomes a very important research field.This thesis analyses various kinds of routing protocols of WSNs, and studies the advantage and disadvantages of these algorithms. Because clustering routing protocol has a good performance on balancing the energy dissipation, this thesis designs a non-uniform clustering routing protocol (NCR). In consideration of the process of multi-hop among the clusters heads, the cluster heads nearing the base station consume much more energy than further ones. NCR takes two factors into consideration during the clustering stage, one is the distance between sensor node and base station and the other is the energy which the node remains. The node which has more energy and much further from the base station will has a big cluster. In the transmission, the heads will choose the routing that is nearer to the BS and cost less energy, so that it will save much energy. Another import point is that there will be many redundancies in the network, so a fusion technique is adopted. In the area near the base station, a main cluster head is chosen. All the data from other cluster heads will be sent to this node and then be fused in a much smaller package.By the experiment, the result shows that the NCR algorithm efficiently decrease the dissipation the energy and prolong about 10% the lifetime of the whole network.