An Energy-Balanced Clustering Routing Algorithm for Wireless Sensor Networks

When cluster heads transmit their data to the sink via multi-hop communication, the cluster heads closer to the sink not only gather the data in its cluster but also forward the data for other cluster heads. These key nodes are burdened with heavy relay traffic and tend to die early. An energy-balanced clustering routing algorithm--EBC is proposed, which adjusts the number of member in a cluster to balance the energy dissipation of every cluster head nodes. The total energy dissipation caused by EBC will be less and it will avoid the key nodes premature failure. Simulation results show that the routing protocol effectively balances the energy consumption among cluster heads and achieves an obvious improvement on the network lifetime.