Distributed unequal clustering algorithm in large-scale wireless sensor networks using fuzzy logic

Clustering is a promising and popular approach to organize sensor nodes into a hierarchical structure, reduce transmitting data to the base station by aggregation methods, and prolong the network lifetime. However, a heavy traffic load may cause the sudden death of nodes due to energy resource depletion in some network regions, i.e., hot spots that lead to network service disruption. This problem is very critical, especially for data-gathering scenarios in which Cluster Heads (CHs) are responsible for collecting and forwarding sensed data to the base station. To avoid hot spot problem, the network workload must be uniformly distributed among nodes. This is achieved by rotating the CH role among all network nodes and tuning cluster size according to CH conditions. In this paper, a clustering algorithm is proposed that selects nodes with the highest remaining energy in each region as candidate CHs, among which the best nodes shall be picked as the final CHs. In addition, to mitigate the hot spot problem, this clustering algorithm employs fuzzy logic to adjust the cluster radius of CH nodes; this is based on some local information, including distance to the base station and local density. Simulation results demonstrate that, by mitigating the hot spot problem, the proposed approach achieves an improvement in terms of both network lifetime and energy conservation.