Fuzzy-K: Energy Efficient Fuzzy Clustering Routing Protocol Based on Cross-Technology Communication in Wireless Sensor Network

The rapid development of wireless sensor networks (WSN) in various fields has brought great convenience. Since most wireless sensor nodes are powered by batteries, energy efficiency is very important for WSN, and many existing routing protocols aim to reduce energy consumption. At present, the emergence of cross technology communication (CTC) enables direct communication between heterogeneous nodes at the physical layer. Therefore, new routing algorithms need to be designed for WSN based on CTC, which considers the heterogeneous characteristics of sensor nodes such as the energy heterogeneity, the mobility of LTE nodes, etc. In this paper, we propose an energy efficient fuzzy clustering routing protocol based on CTC, which is named as Fuzzy-K. Different from other protocols, Fuzzy-K first uses k-means algorithm to form balanced clusters and then select CH (cluster head). In the proposed protocol, the Mamdani fuzzy inference system (FIS) is used twice to select the initial cluster center and the final CH. The input parameters of these two systems are obviously different, which considers the differences in frame length, mobility and other heterogenous characters between nodes. Simulation results of three different network topologies show that compared with LEACH, EEHCCP, TEAR and DUCF, Fuzzy-K protocol has better performance in extending network life cycle, balancing network load and improving network throughput. And the average value of the rounds when first node dies could be 27% higher than the protocols mentioned above. What’s more, the proposed protocol is scalable across a range of situation by changing parameters of the FIS.