A Competition-Based Unequal Clustering Multihop Approach for Wireless Sensor Networks

The energy efficiency and stability of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have always been a hot issue in the research. Clustering is a typical architecture for WSNs, and cluster heads (CHs) play a vital role. Unreasonable CH selection causes a lot of energy consumption. In this paper, we propose a competition-based unequal clustering multihop approach (CUCMA). CHs are selected by competition. First, the cluster radius (CR) of a node is calculated according to the distance to base station (BS). Then, CR is resized based on the number of around nodes. Only the nodes with high residual energy and appropriate distances to the selected CHs maybe become CHs, which are usually closer to the surrounding nodes. CUCMA and four related approaches are simulated in different scenarios. The results are analyzed, and it is proved that CUCMA balances the energy consumption of the CHs and reduces the energy consumption of the whole networks, thus leading to prolong the lifetime of WSNs.