Abstract
In Wireless Ad hoc Networks (WANET), to organize sensor nodes for data collection is an important research issue. Clustering is an effective technique for prolonging the network lifetime. However, the Cluster Header (CH) in a cluster always involves a lot of data forwarding tasks, rather than its Cluster Members (CMs). This energy consumption overloading inevitably leads to the “hot spot” problem. With these in mind, an Energy-Balanced and Unequally-Layered Routing Protocol (EBULRP) is proposed in this article. The main emphasis is on balancing the energy consumption among CHs. In our design, the network is decoupled into multiple layers with different width, where the radius of clusters is differentiated at each layer. The core is to organize those CHs closer to the sink node, with more energy for inter-cluster data forwarding. Simulation results show that the proposed EBULRP effectively balances the energy consumption among CHs, and further prolongs the network lifetime.