A Weight-Based Unequal Clustering Routing Protocol in Wireless Sensor Network

Currently, many routing protocols are proposed to balance energy consumption and prolong network life-time. Unequal Cluster-based Routing Protocol (UCR) to mitigate hot spot problem was defined in previous researches. Hot spot problem arises when a Cluster Head cooperates with another Cluster Head. The Cluster Head near to the Base Station is burdened with heavier relay traffic data and tends to die a lot faster. UCR chooses Cluster Head based on distance and energy of the node. When a node is at a distant from the Base Station, it may be weak but it may have higher energy than other nodes in the cluster, so it is difficult to choose a Cluster Head from the nodes. It creates a hot spot problem. For this reason, we propose a Weight-Based Unequal Clustering Routing (WBUCR) Protocol in Wireless Sensor Network to mitigate hot spot and to achieve balanced energy consumption and prolong network life time in WSN. WBUCR is based on weight metric to choose Cluster Head. The sensor field is divided into energy levels and in every level we choose one Cluster Head as a Cluster Head Leader. This Cluster Head Leader collects data from other Cluster Heads in this level and sends data to another Cluster Head Leader another level. Finally the last Cluster Head Leader in chain sends the aggregated data to the Base Station. We will show how WBUCR outperforms UCR with several experiments.