Load Balanced Unequal Clusteringalgorithm In Wireless Sensor Networks

With the development of communication and computing technology, the wireless sensor networks(WSN) which includes the sensor technology, embedded technology, wireless networks communication technology, micro-elect-mechanical technology and distributed information processing technology is playing an increasingly important role in military applications, monitoring environment and industrial production.There are many important issues about WSN design, but the most important one is how to increase the energy efficiency and prolong lifetime of the whole network. This is due to the sensors are battery-powered and hard to be recharged, so the energy is very limited. Clustering protocol in wireless sensor networks is an important energy-saving technology. The typical hierarchical clustering protocol LEACH divides the sensor nodes into two categories, cluster head and cluster member. Cluster members send the monitoring data to the cluster heads and then sleep so as to save energy. The responsibility of cluster heads is fusing and sending these data to sink. In this way, the limited energy problem of sensor nodes can be solved efficiently. But these protocols have problems like cluster heads distribute unevenly and energy consume unevenly etc.This paper concerned on the problems in the traditional wireless sensor network, we propose Load Balanced Unequal Clustering Algorithm(LBUC). In LBUC, the entire network has been divided into some cells including same nodes according to the distance between the nodes and the sink. The nodes in the cell closest to the sink communicate with sink by single hop while nodes in the other cell communicate with sink by multiple hops. Meanwhile, LBUC constructs cluster unevenly in different cell and evenly in the same cell such that the size of cluster in the closer cell are smaller and the number of cluster is more compared with the cluster in the farther cell. This can preserve some energy for inter-cluster data relaying, balance the load and prolong the lifetime of the entire network efficiently. Next, aiming at the direct data sending in LEACH, LBUC considers the residual energy of the nodes and the shortest path algorithm to reduce the average energy consumption of the network.Through simulation and comparison, it proves that LBUC can reduce energy consumption efficiently and prolong lifetime of the network. It solves the problem of low energy efficiency about LEACH protocol to some extent and achieves the purpose of improvement.