Weight Driven Cluster Head Rotation for Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Energy efficiency is one of the major issues in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), due to the limited power and processing capabilities of the Sensor Nodes (SNs). The clustering techniques are the effective solution to improve the energy efficiency and prolong the network lifetime. However, in the data transmission task, the Cluster Heads (CHs) consume more energy than the ordinary Cluster Members (CMs). Moreover, more energy and time are wasted through the cluster selection in every round. In an attempt to fill in this gap, we propose a new protocol called Weight Driven Cluster Head Rotation for Wireless Sensor Network (WDCR). The WDCR introduces a new weight-driven rotation method to balance the energy consumption among nodes within a cluster, along with unequal clustering algorithm to balance the energy consumption among clusters. The Simulation experiments show that WDCR reduces the energy dissipation of sensor node, and improves the network lifetime compared to the existing cluster protocols.