Unequal Cluster-Based Routing Protocol in Wireless Sensor Networks

In order to balance relatively the energy consumption of network node in wireless sensor networks (WSNs), this paper presents Sink mobility based and energy balancing unequal clustering protocol (SEBUCP). By adopting the improved SFLA (shuffled frog leaping algorithm), SEBUCP chooses the nodes having more residual energy and powerful communication capabilities as cluster heads and divides all nodes into clusters of different size. And competition mechanism between cluster heads is introduced, which is helpful to form a more rational cluster topology. In order to reduce the cluster head replacement frequency, cluster head serves continuously and by comparing nodes weight to determine the cluster head exchange time. The greedy algorithm is introduced to select an optimum relay node between cluster head and Sink. To further reduce the energy consumption of nodes, mobile Sink routing algorithm is also introduced to avoid the “hot-spots” problem. Simulation results demonstrate that SEBUCP has good performance on the network lifetime, energy balance and so on.