A Novel Node Deployment and Clustering Scheme in Wireless Sensor Networks

Clustering techniques in routing protocols is an effective topology control approach, which can increase the scalability of wireless sensor networks and efficiently utilize the limited energy resources of the sensor nodes. However, the problem of the hot spots exists in current clustering algorithms. When cluster heads corporately forward the data packets to sink with multi-hop communication, some cluster heads tend to die earlier due to heavy relay load, which results in the network being partitioned. We present a novel node deployment and clustering scheme based on unequal density (UDNDC) for wireless sensor networks. The more nodes are deployed in the area with more relay traffic, thus they can provide enough energy for the inter-cluster data forwarding. Simulation results show that UDNDC effectively balances the energy consumption among network nodes and obviously prolongs the network lifetime.