An Improved Energy Aware Distributed Clustering Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

The present work considers energy aware distributed clustering protocol (EADC) which is commonly employed for balancing the energy consumption in non-uniformly deployed sensor networks. In the EADC, residual energy is considered as the primary clustering parameter and the clusters are constructed using uniform competition radius. However in non-uniform node distribution scenarios, more energy imbalance occurs in the network due to variation in intra-cluster energy consumption. For counter balancing it, an inter-cluster energy-efficient multi-hop routing protocol is utilized. In the EADC protocol, cluster heads select the relay node based on residual energy and cluster member count information. But this approach is less efficient in energy balancing. In this paper, an improved energy aware distributed equal clustering protocol is projected. Our scheme considers the relay metric directly in terms of energy expense in relaying the sensed data to the base station taking into account not only the residual energy and member count information but also distance information. It provides better balancing of energy in comparison with the existing approach. Three different scenarios created by varying node distribution are used for evaluating the performance of the proposed protocol and comparison is made with the EADC protocol. The results show that the proposed scheme extends network lifetime in all the scenarios.