Layered Clustering Routing Protocol with Overlapping Cluster Heads in WSN

A sensor network consisting of hundreds to thousands of small and limited powered nodes with a processing unit called sink or base station connected wirelessly is called a wireless sensor network. It is considerably reasonable to design and develop these small, limited powered sensing nodes with low cost. As these nodes are limited battery powered therefore energy conservation is a key issue. Various routings protocols are designed earlier to conserve energy thereby maximizing the network lifetime. In this paper, we proposed a new clustering protocol LCRPOCH in which the clustering is done using layered approach where cluster heads (CHs) coordinate with the overlapping cluster heads (OCHS) in multi-hop fashion to transfer the data to the sink. Finally, simulation is done using MATLAB which shows that our proposed protocol is better than the conventional clustering protocol EEICCP in terms of cost, network lifetime and throughput.