An improved energy aware distributed unequal clustering protocol for heterogeneous wireless sensor networks

In this paper, an improved version of the energy aware distributed unequal clustering protocol (EADUC) is projected. The EADUC protocol is commonly used for solving energy hole problem in multi-hop wireless sensor networks. In the EADUC, location of base station and residual energy are given importance as clustering parameters. Based on these parameters, different competition radii are assigned to nodes. Herein, a new approach has been proposed to improve the working of EADUC, by electing cluster heads considering number of nodes in the neighborhood in addition to the above two parameters. The inclusion of the neighborhood information for computation of the competition radii provides better balancing of energy in comparison with the existing approach. Furthermore, for the selection of next hop node, the relay metric is defined directly in terms of energy expense instead of only the distance information used in the EADUC and the data transmission phase has been extended in every round by performing the data collection number of times through use of major slots and mini-slots. The methodology used is of retaining the same clusters for a few rounds and is effective in reducing the clustering overhead. The performance of the proposed protocol has been evaluated under three different scenarios and compared with existing protocols through simulations. The results show that the proposed scheme outperforms the existing protocols in terms of network lifetime in all the scenarios.