RUHEED-Rotated Unequal Clustering Algorithm for Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Prolonging the network lifetime, scalability and balancing are very important requirements when implementing a wireless sensor network (WSN). Clustering is a technique that has been widely applied for achieving these goals. However, there exists the energy hole problem which causes an unbalanced energy consumption in equally formed clusters. More specifically, nodes near the base station (BS) die very quickly since they, not only transmit their own data, but also forwards the rest of the network data. In this article, we propose a rotated unequal clustering protocol RUHEED in order to mitigate the energy hole problem. Our experiments show that RUHEED improves the network lifetime when compared to other clustering protocols.