ACRM: An Adaptive Cluster Radius Multihop Routing Protocol with Direction Awareness for Large-Scale WSNs

As the scale of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) continues to expand, challenges such as excessive network energy consumption and load imbalance have become increasingly severe. Existing nonuniform clustering protocols rely on fixed parameters and local information, lack the ability to dynamically perceive global energy differences, and are thus difficult to adapt to the dynamic changes of large-scale networks for balancing energy consumption and load. To address this issue, this article proposes an adaptive cluster radius multihop (ACRM) routing protocol suitable for large-scale WSNs. The protocol provides a decision-making basis for the adjustment of nodes’ personalized competition radii and auction-based cluster head (CH) selection through an energy disparity factor quantified based on the Gini coefficient. On this basis, CH selection is modeled as a static game with incomplete information. Through an auction mechanism, CH seats are allocated according to the principle of maximizing bid prices, and a price decay strategy is introduced to prevent overloading of low-energy nodes. In the routing phase, intracluster routing employs hierarchical decision-making to select a subset of nodes for multihop communication to reduce energy consumption; while intercluster routing establishes multihop paths based on a direction-aware scoring mechanism that integrates node direction and energy, effectively avoiding path detours and reverse transmissions. In addition, unlike existing nonuniform clustering protocols, ACRM effectively addresses the issues of CH overload near the base station (BS) and excessive energy consumption from frequent clustering through directly connected (DC) node offloading and adaptive periodic reconfiguration. Simulation results show that in a 500 × 500 m network scenario, the network stability period of ACRM reaches 636 rounds, which is over 100% higher than that of protocols such as LEACH, LEACH-OR, EEUC, and DEBUC, approximately 61.8% higher than PUAG, and 18.4% higher than UCRTD; significant improvements are also observed in the overall network lifetime and the number of data packets received by the BS.

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