| Abstract: | Sensor nodes are powered by battery and have severe energy constraints. The typical many‐to‐one traffic pattern causes uneven energy consumption among sensor nodes, that is, sensor nodes near the base station or a cluster head have much heavier traffic burden and run out of power much faster than other nodes. The uneven node energy dissipation dramatically reduces sensor network lifetime. In a previous work, we presented the chessboard clustering scheme to increase network lifetime by balancing node energy consumption. To achieve good performance and scalability, we propose to form a heterogeneous sensor network by deploying a few powerful high‐end sensors in addition to a large number of low‐end sensors. In this paper, we design an efficient routing protocol based on the chessboard clustering scheme, and we compute the minimum node density for satisfying a given lifetime constraint. Simulation experiments show that the chessboard clustering‐based routing protocol balances node energy consumption very well and dramatically increases network lifetime, and it performs much better than two other clustering‐based schemes. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. |
