Low-Energy Adaptive Unequal Clustering Protocol Using Fuzzy c-Means in Wireless Sensor Networks

Clustering technique in wireless sensor networks incorporate proper utilization of the limited energy resources of the deployed sensor nodes with the highest residual energy that can be used to gather data and send the information. However, the problem of unbalanced energy consumption exists in a particular cluster node in the network. Some more powerful nodes act as cluster head to control sensor network operation when the network is organized into heterogeneous clusters. It is important to assume that energy consumption of these cluster head nodes is balanced. Often the network is organized into clusters of equal size where cluster head nodes bear unequal loads. Instead in this paper, we proposed a new protocol low-energy adaptive unequal clustering protocol using Fuzzy c-means in wireless sensor networks (LAUCF), an unequal clustering size model for the organization of network based on Fuzzy c-means (FCM) clustering algorithm, which can lead to more uniform energy dissipation among the cluster head nodes, thus increasing network lifetime. A heuristic comparison between our proposed protocol LAUCF and other different energy-aware protocol including low energy adaptive clustering hierarchy (LEACH) has been carried out. Simulation result shows that our proposed heterogeneous clustering approach using FCM protocol is more effective in prolonging the network lifetime compared with LEACH and other protocol for long run.