ICMH-CHR: An intra-cluster multi-hop based cluster head rotation protocol for wireless sensor networks

In wireless sensor networks (WSN), clustered routing protocols usually require periodic re-clustering to balance the energy among nodes. Frequent clustering aggravates the energy consumed by the network into clusters and ignores whether the network needs to be re-clustered every round, cluster head (CH) rotation is proposed to counter this problem. In this paper, we propose an intra-cluster multi-hop based CH rotation (ICMH-CHR) protocol for WSN. This protocol sets two thresholds based on the average residual energy in the cluster. These thresholds are used to dynamically regulate the network re-clustering and CH rotation strategies, respectively, to reduce the number of network re-clustering and avoid the premature death of CH nodes. In addition, the intra-cluster multi-hop strategy is used to solve the problem of CHs moving away from the cluster center due to intra-cluster rotation. For inter-cluster communication, the CH selects the most energy-efficient relay node by measuring the distance to other CHs through RSSI. Simulation results show that the proposed ICMH-CHR effectively extends the network lifetime and performs well in load balancing compared to LEACH, EEUC, T-LEACH, EEHCCP, and EAUCA.