An Unequally Clustered Multi-hop Routing Protocol Based on Fuzzy Logic for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is associated with a new exemplification of a real-time embedded system used for various applications that make the traditional infrastructure-based network seem infeasible. Due to imbalanced energy consumption among nodes, WSN has challenges with better utilization of energy and system enhancement. Clustering has been a better approach in this sequence. Therefore, this paper will utilize a fuzzy logic-based clustering protocol (unequal clustering) with multi-hop transmission for load balancing, energy consumption minimization, and network lifetime prolongation. The protocol forms unequal clusters with cluster head (CH) being selected by fuzzy logic with competition radius. Node distance to the base station, concentration, and residual energy are input variables. The simulation and results section displays the outperformance of the proposed protocol, where the low-energy adaptive clustering hierarchy (LEACH), energy-aware multi-hop multi-path hierarchical (EAMMH), energy-aware unequal clustering fuzzy (EAUCF), and two-tier distributed fuzzy logic-based protocol (TTDFP) for efficient data aggregation in multi-hop wireless sensor networks algorithms.