An Improved Energy Balanced Dissimilar Clustered Routing Architecture for Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

In wireless sensor networks, clustering of nodes effectively conserves considerable amount of energy resulting in increased network life-time. Clustering protocols do not consider density of nodes in cluster formation, which increases the possibility of hotspots in areas where the density of nodes is very less. If the node density is very high, cluster-heads may expend high energy leading to their early death. Existing cluster protocols that concentrate on energy conservation have not exhibited their impact on packet delivery and delay. In this proposed protocol, clusters are constructed based on the range of nodes, distance between neighbouring nodes and density of nodes over a region resulting in the formation of dissimilar clusters. With this method, the entire sensing region is considered to be a large circular region with base station positioned at the centre. Initially, the nodes that can be able to reach base station in a single hop are considered for constructing inner smaller circular regions over the entire region. This method is iterated for n-hop nodes until n-concentric circular regions are formed. These circular boundaries are reconstructed based on a distance metric, density of nodes and a divergence factor. Using this architecture, network analysis is done by routing data to the base station from different sized clusters. Based on simulation results, this new protocol Dynamic Unequal Clustered Routing (D-UCR), despite being energy efficient, showed better data delivery ratio and minimized delay when compared with other traditional clustering algorithms such as Leach and Equal Clustered Routing.