An unequal layered clustering approach for large scale wireless sensor networks

Clustering provides an effective way to prolonging the lifetime in many large scale wireless sensor network application. But the hot-spots problem is unavoidable in data transmission. In this work, we propose an unequal layered clustering protocol for periodical data gathering application to mitigate the hot-spots problem in large scale wireless sensor network. Layer closer to base station have smaller size than those farther away from the base, thus the cluster heads in inner layer can preserve more energy for data relay from outer. Local competition and local join mechanism make the cluster well-distributed and get smaller overhead. A layered multi-hop routing protocol for the inter-cluster communication also presented. Simulation results show that our mechanism makes an improvement on the network lifetime.