Edinburgh Napier University

  In Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), clustering techniques are among the effective solutions to reduce energy consumption and prolong the network lifetime. During the iterative re-clustering process, extra energy and time are consumed especially at the setup phase of every round. To address these issues, we propose a new cluster-based protocol namely, Dynamic Load-balancing Cluster Based Protocol (DLCP). Our protocol introduces a new inter-cluster approach to increase the network lifetime, rotates continuously the election of the Cluster Head (CH) in each cluster, and selects the node with the highest residual energy in each round. When the energy of CHs falls below a fixed threshold (TCH), a new clustering process is created. Extensive simulation experiments show that our proposed approach balances effectively the energy consumption among all sensor nodes and increases the network lifetime compared to other clustering protocols.