An energy-balancing clustering approach for gradient-based routing in wireless sensor networks

Clustering significantly reduces the energy consumption of each individual sensor in a wireless sensor network (WSN), and also increases the communication load on cluster heads. Because of the unbalanced energy consumption among cluster heads, the hot spots problem will arise when using the multihop forwarding model for the intercluster communication. Unequal clustering is an effective way to balance the energy consumption of cluster heads. In this paper, we present an Energy-Balancing unequal Clustering Approach for Gradient-based routing (EBCAG) in wireless sensor networks. It partitions the nodes into clusters of unequal size, and each sensor node maintains a gradient value, which is defined as its minimum hop count to the sink. The size of a cluster is decided by the gradient value of its cluster head, and the data gathered from the cluster members should follow the direction of descending gradient to reach the sink. Simulation results show that EBCAG balances the energy consumption among the cluster heads, and significantly improves the network lifetime. (c) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.