Edinburgh Napier University

  In Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), clustering techniques are usually used as a key effective solution to reduce energy consumption and prolong the network lifetime. Despite many works on clustering in WSNs, this issue is still, however, in its infancy as most existing solutions suffer from long and iterative clustering cycles. In an attempt to fill in this gap, we propose a new cluster-based protocol, referred to as Load-balancing Cluster Based Protocol (LCP) that introduces a new inter-cluster approach to increase network lifetime. This new protocol rotates continuously the election of the Cluster Head (CH) election in each cluster, and selects the node with the highest residual energy in each round. Extensive simulation experiments show that our proposed approach effectively balances energy consumer among all sensor nodes and increases network lifetime compared to other clustering protocols.