Two-step fuzzy logic system to achieve energy efficiency and prolonging the lifetime of WSNs

Mainly because of resource restrictions in wireless sensor networks (WSNs), extending the lifetime of the network, has gained significant attention in the last several years. As energy becomes a quite challenging issue in these networks, clustering protocols are employed to deal with this problem. One of the main research areas in cluster-based routing protocols is fair distribution and balancing the overall energy consumption in the WSN, by selecting the most suitable cluster heads (CHs). In order to reduce the energy consumption and enhancing the CHs selection process a new routing protocol based on fuzzy logic has been proposed. There exist several algorithms based of fuzzy logic to select the most proper CHs for the network. But these algorithms do not consider all the important parameters and information of the sensor nodes in order to guarantee the optimal selection of the CHs. In The proposed algorithm, a two-step fuzzy logic system is used to select the appropriate CHs. The selection of CHs is based on six descriptors; residual energy, density, distance to base station, vulnerability index, centrality and distance between CHs. The result of the simulation indicates that, the proposed algorithm performs better comparing with some other similar approaches in case of fair distribution and balancing of the overall energy consumption.