Enhancing Harvested Energy Utilization for Energy Harvesting Wireless Sensor Networks by an Improved Uneven Clustering Protocol

The energy limitation in traditional wireless sensor networks is effectively ameliorated by equipping energy harvesting modules and rechargeable batteries on nodes in energy harvesting wireless sensor networks (EH-WSNs). However, enhancing the harvested energy utilization is still a challenge. In this paper, we proposed an improved uneven clustering protocol to enhance the harvested energy utilization of EH-WSNs. The protocol contains cluster establishment and data collection stages. To reduce the energy consumed for cluster head (CH) selection and reserve more energy for data transmission, a novel CH selection scheme is proposed to select nodes with better performance as CHs. To further enhance the harvested energy utilization, a dynamic transmission power adjustment scheme is designed for both CHs and cluster members in the data collection stage under the limited capacity of rechargeable batteries. A series of experiments are conducted to verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, and the results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm utilizes the harvested energy more efficiently and performs better than the corresponding competitors.