A dynamic multi-hop clustering algorithm with low energy protection for wireless sensor networks

For wireless sensor networks with large quantity of nodes, clustering approach is widely used to enhance the network performances by prolonging the network lifetime. In this paper, a dynamic multi-hop clustering algorithm with low energy protection (DMC) has been proposed. Together with average energy of the network, a weak node threshold and a strong node threshold are determined to classify sensor nodes into four energy levels. Some weak nodes are protected with cluster heads nearby and special weak cluster heads are protected with dynamic multi-hop connections to reduce their energy consumption. The simulation results show that DMC can prolong the network lifetime obviously.