Novel unequal clustering routing protocol considering energy balancing based on network partition & distance for mobile education

In Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) of mobile education (such as mobile learning), in order to keep a better and lower energy consumption, reduce the energy hole and prolong the network life cycle, we propose a novel unequal clustering routing protocol considering energy balancing based on network partition & distance (UCNPD, which means Unequal Clustering based on Network Partition & Distance) for WSN in this paper. In the design model of this protocol, we know that all the network node data reaches the base station (BS) through the nodes near the BS, and the nodes in this area will use more energy, so we define a ring area using the BS as the center to form a circle, then we partition the network area based on the distance from node to the BS. These parts of nodes are to build connection with the BS, and the others follow the optimized clustering routing service protocol which uses a timing mechanism to elect the cluster head. It reduces the energy consumption of cluster reconstruction. Furthermore, we build unequal clusters by setting different competitive radius, which is helpful for balancing the network energy consumption. For the selection of message route, we considered all the energy of cluster head, the distances to BS and the degrees of node to reduce and balance the energy consumption. Simulation results demonstrate that the protocol can efficiently decrease the speed of the nodes death, prolong the network lifetime, and balance the energy dissipation of all nodes.