Energy efficient Chessboard Clustering and routing in heterogeneous sensor networks

Sensor nodes have severe energy constraints. The typical many-to-one traffic pattern in sensor networks causes uneven energy consumption among sensor nodes, i.e., sensor nodes near a sink or cluster head have much heavier traffic burden and run out of power much faster than other nodes. This can dramatically reduce sensor network lifetime. In this paper, we adopt a heterogeneous sensor network model and propose a novel Chessboard Clustering (CC) scheme. We also design an efficient routing protocol based on the CC scheme. Extensive simulations show that our scheme balances node energy consumption very well and significantly increases network lifetime.