New Heterogeneous Clustering Protocol for Prolonging Wireless Sensor Networks Lifetime

Abstract

Clustering in wireless sensor networks is one of the crucial methods for increasing of network lifetime. The network characteristics of existing classical clustering protocols for wireless sensor network are homogeneous. Clustering protocols fail to maintain the stability of the system, especially when nodes are heterogeneous. We have seen that the behavior of Heterogeneous-Hierarchical Energy Aware Routing Protocol (H-HEARP) becomes very unstable once the first node dies, especially in the presence of node heterogeneity. In this paper we assume a new clustering protocol whose network characteristics is heterogeneous for prolonging of network lifetime. The computer simulation results demonstrate that the proposed clustering algorithm outperforms than other clustering algorithms in terms of the time interval before the death of the first node (we refer to as stability period). The simulation results also show the high performance of the proposed clustering algorithm for higher values of extra energy brought by more powerful nodes.

Keywords

• Heterogeneity
• Lifetime
• Clustering
• WirelessSensorNetworks.