A Clustering Method for Wireless Sensor Networks with Heterogeneous Node Types

Recently, sensor network systems are gradually moving into heterogeneous designs, incorporating a mixture of variety kinds of sensor nodes. Many routing protocols have been proposed for sensor networks but most of them did not consider the non-uniform energy drainage caused by many-to-one traffic. In this paper we propose a clustering method for wireless sensor networks with heterogeneous node types which select cluster heads considering not only transmission power and residual energy of each node but also those of it´s adjacent nodes. Simulations show that our method significantly increases network lifetime and also maintains high coverage rate in comparison with existing methods.