## 4 Performance Evaluation
### Clustered Network Performance Evaluation  
Figures 5-8 show the performance of the network where nodes are divided into clusters based on the conditions explained in the system model. Similar to Figure 1, Figure 5 shows the changes in power intensity of a clustered network in different stages. As is shown, using adaptive power control, the network balances the energy consumption in different parts of the network. Compared to Figure 1, it can be observed that, with clustering, the network achieves better energy distribution that results in better performance. Figure 6 shows the performance of the network in terms of the lifetime of nodes. As can be seen from Figure 6a from round 200, some nodes start running out of batteries. As can be seen, using an adaptable power control network shows slightly lower number of inactive nodes. Like the flat network, in cluster network increasing the number of nodes to 200, we observe more inactive nodes. However, using clustering network shows around 3% less inactive nodes compared to a flat network. Similar to Figure 2b, in Figure 6b, it can also be observed that, due to those inactive nodes, several other nodes get disconnected from the network. However, by adjusting the power control to the network condition, nodes stay connected. Comparing Figures 2 and 6, we can see how clustering in the network improves the performance and we observe a lower number of inactive and disconnected nodes. Figure 5: Clustered network power level heatmap demonstrating the changes in the nodes power level in four stages of the running network. Figure 7 depicts the network end-to-end performance. As can be seen in Figure 7a, without using power control network achieves around 70% with 100 nodes and 80% with 200 nodes, which shows improvement compared to the network without clustering that is around 62% and 70% in the 100 and 200 nodes case, respectively (Figure 3a). The reason behind this improvement is the lower disconnected nodes in the network. While using adaptable power control, the network reaches higher PDR and the performance is similar with the network without clustering and it shows around 80% and more than 90% PDR in the 100 and 200 nodes case, respectively. In terms of average hop-count depicted in Figure 7b, the network shows almost the same pattern with a slight increase in hop count compared to a network without clustering. Figure 8 shows the network performance in terms of power consumption. It can be seen that, due to an increase in transmission power using adaptive power control network, it consumes more power on average and it drops to nearly 35% and 45% for the 100 and 200 nodes, respectively. However, comparing Figure 8a with Figure 4a, it can be observed that using clustering network results in more than a 10% increase in remaining power per node than when not using it. In terms of packet cost, with and without power control, the network shows the same performance and it consumes 15 power units on average, where this value is 17 units without clustering for 100 nodes. Using 200 nodes, the network shows the same pattern with an increase in packet cost that reaches 20 units per packet. Figure 6: Network performance in a clustered network in terms of (**a**) number of inactive nodes and (**b**) number of disconnected nodes. Figure 7: Network performance in a clustered network in terms of (**a**) average packet delivery ratio and (**b**) average length of path. A comparison of the proposed protocol with three well-known protocols energy-efficient unequal clustering (EEUC), hybrid, energy-efficient, distributed clustering (HEED) [46], and low energy adaptive clustering hierarchy (LEACH) [47] has been performed in order to study the performance of the proposed protocol. The result of the comparison is depicted in Figure 9. As can be seen from the figure, the proposed protocol start losing some nodes around round 300, while other protocols start performing better. The reason behind is the sudden increase in the transmission power of some nodes in the proposed protocol.