Sensors, Vol. 19, Pages 829: Enhanced Three Layer Hybrid Clustering Mechanism for Energy Efficient Routing in IoT (Sensors)

Recently, different routing techniques were proposed for three layer clustering topology in Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) which outperform the basic two layer clustering hierarchy. The problem that remains in these approaches is the heavy control packet exchange between nodes after every round in order to choose efficient lower layer heads. Among these techniques is Hybrid Hierarchical Clustering Approach (HHCA), in which a distributed approach is proposed. According to HHCA, the upper layer heads are centrally selected by base station, while sensor nodes only have to select lower layer heads distributively. In this paper, enhanced three layer hybrid clustering mechanism is proposed that limits the exchange of control packets between nodes after every round for lower layer head selection. The energy of nodes are divided into levels upon which it is decided when nodes of a cluster need to enter into new cluster head selection phase. The proposed mechanism helps to limit control packet exchange between nodes to a large extent, at the same time keeping energy consumption between nodes balanced. Moreover, it is focused that higher layer heads are selected by base station in a manner that reduces backward transmission in the network as much as possible. Simulation results show that nodes in the proposed mechanism stay alive for a longer time as compared to other approaches, and it outperforms HHCA technique in network lifetime based on Half of the Nodes Alive (HNA) by 18 percent.