Variable initial energy and unequal clustering (VEUC) based multicasting in WSN

Multicast Communication plays an important role in most of the resource constrained networking environments such as Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN), Internet of Things (IOT). Communication in WSN is restricted by energy, computation and memory capabilities of sensor nodes. Designing an efficient routing algorithm to achieve communication between Stationary Base station (BS) and a cluster of sensor nodes in a specific region requires the base station to send individual messages to all sensor nodes. This approach consumes a large amount of energy and bandwidth. A variety of algorithms exist to address this issue by dividing the sensor nodes into clusters. Each cluster is monitored by a Cluster Head (CH), responsible for gathering and aggregating data to send the same to the BS. In this paper, we reviewed existing clustering techniques and propose an unequal clustering based scheme. This allows the BS to communicate a multicast message to cluster members as well as a cluster head to communicate with other cluster members. The results show that our approach improves network lifetime.