Abstract

In wireless sensor networks, an energy efficient data gathering scheme is one of core technologies to process a query. The cluster-based data gathering methods minimize the energy consumption of sensor nodes by maximizing the efficiency of data aggregation. However, since the existing clustering methods consider only uniform network environments, they are not suitable for the real world applications that sensor nodes can be distributed unevenly. To solve such a problem, we propose a balanced multi-hop clustering scheme in non-uniform wireless sensor networks. The proposed scheme constructs a cluster based on the logical distance to the cluster head using a min-distance hop count. To show the superiority of our proposed scheme, we compare it with the existing clustering schemes in sensor networks. Our experimental results show that our proposed scheme prolongs about 48% lifetime over the existing methods on average.