Energy efficient Chessboard Clustering and routing in heterogeneous sensor networks

Sensor nodes are powered by battery and have severe energy constrains. The typical many-to-one traffic pattern causes uneven energy consumption among sensor nodes, i.e., sensor nodes near sink or 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 this paper, we propose a novel chessboard clustering scheme to maximize network lifetime by balancing node energy consumption. To achieve good scalability and performance, we propose to form a heterogeneous sensor network by deploying a small number of powerful high-end sensors in addition to a large number of lowend sensors. We also design an efficient routing protocol based on the chessboard clustering scheme. Extensive simulation experiments show that our scheme balances node energy consumption very well and significantly increases network lifetime, and it performs much better than two other clustering schemes – LEACH and LRS.