HIGH: A Hexagon-based Intelligent Grouping Approach in Wireless Sensor Networks

In a random deployment or uniform deployment strategy, sensor nodes are scattered randomly or uniformly in the sensing field, respectively. Hence, the coverage ratio cannot be guaranteed. The coverage ratio of uniform deployment, in general, is larger than that of the random deployment strategy. However, a random deployment or uniform deployment strategy may cause unbalanced traffic pattern in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Therefore, cluster heads (CHs) around the sink have larger loads than those farther away from the sink. That is, CHs close to the sink exhaust their energy earlier. In order to overcome the above problem, we propose a Hexagon-based Intelligent Grouping approacH in WSNs (called HIGH). The coverage, energy consumption and data routing issues are well investigated and taken into consideration in the proposed HIGH scheme. The simulation results validate our theoretical analysis and show that the proposed HIGH scheme achieves a satisfactory coverage ratio, balances the energy consumption among sensor nodes, and extends network lifetime significantly.