LAUSR

Partition of nodes into clusters is one of the most accepted method for achieving energy efficiency and scalability in wireless sensor networks. In this paper, we have modified the Fuzzy C-Means algorithm to partition the network into clusters such as to ensure that the resulted clusters are both spatially efficient and are sharing equal data transmission load. Further in this paper, we have re-defined the medium access protocol for cluster heads. The proposed medium access protocol is dependent upon the data traffic at the Cluster heads. Cluster heads with high traffic are given preference to access the channel and cluster head(s) having low traffic are made to wait for comparatively higher back-off time. By giving more time to cluster heads with lower initial data to collect more data, energy efficiency of the system is increased and contention losses are decreased due to reduction in number of transmissions between cluster heads and sink. The proposed method has been simulated and compared with LEACH protocol, a FCM based clustering protocol and Zonal based Deterministic Energy Efficient Clustering Protocol. The simulation results show that our proposed method performs better in terms of network performance parameters viz. network lifetime, energy dissipation, throughput and packet delivery ratio.