Uneven clustering: An approach to maximize the lifetime of sensor nodes

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are made up of thousands of tiny electronic devices with the ability to monitor and communicate with one another. These tiny electronics devices are called as nodes normally placed in an operational environment with the purpose of sensing and gathering environmental data, like pollution levels, humidity, pressure, and temperature etc. The collected data can be sent to central place called base station or sink for further processing. The wireless sensor networks are characterised by certain constraints such as battery energy, storage space and computation ability due to the employment of midrange microprocessors/microcontrollers. The majority of the application involves the sensor nodes being placed haphazardly inside the targeted area, necessitating unsupervised operations. The typical design issue in the operation of WSN is the self-organization, since the WSNs are used in difficulty terrains in which human intervention is not possible. The basic function of sensor nodes is to sense, collect, process and forward the data to base station. These processes must be designed in such away that the energy consumption by the node must be very less, since the energy in the sensor node is limited. The majority of routing protocols work to extend the life of networks by lowering power usage. The literature review provides an evident that the clustering WSN for data forwarding is best way to maximize the lifetime of the networks. The purpose of this research paper is to maximize the lifetime of wireless nodes by proposing an energy-efficient uneven cluster-based routing protocol (UCR). In this protocol, the uneven clusters are created by dividing the network in such way that, the cluster size increases as we move away from the base station. The primary objective of the uneven clustering is that the load in terms of energy consumption is distributed almost uniformly among cluster heads (CHs). The proposed UCR take care of hot spot issues well with uneven cluster size. This approach pays significantly towards network longevity.