An Energy-Efficient Unequal Clustering Method for Wireless Sensor Networks

Organizing wireless sensor networks into clusters enables the efficient utilization of the limited energy resources of the deployed sensor nodes. Oftentimes the network is organized into clusters of equal size, but such equal clustering results in an unequal load on the cluster head nodes. Instead, we propose an Unequal Clustering Method (UCM) for network organization, which can lead to more uniform energy dissipation among the cluster head nodes, thus increasing network lifetime. Simulation results show that UCM outperforms LEACH significantly with prolonging the network lifetime over 39%.