Improved Unequal-Clustering and Routing Protocol

Increased network lifetime is a desired property of low-powered and energy-constrained Internet of Things (IoT) devices that are deployed in wireless network environments. Clustering is used as a technique in multiple solutions to improve overall network lifetime. Further variants in the clustering process are defined to optimize the results. One such variant is equal clustering, where all the clusters have the same size. However, this approach suffers from the issue of nodes closer to the base station (BS) dying out earlier. As an alternative, unequal clustering is proposed, where clusters close to the BS are of smaller size; thus, cluster heads (CHs) consume a substantial proportion of their energy for being acting as data forwarding nodes. In this paper, we propose an unequal clustering approach with the BS at the center of a circular area. The size of each cluster is fixed and computed based on the node density of the area. The number of clusters increases from outwards to inwards towards the BS. The results show considerable performance gain over selected benchmark works.