Distributed Energy Efficient Cluster Formation for Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

In large scale wireless sensor networks clustering is often used for improving energy efficiency and achieving scalable performance. In the clustered environment, data gathered by the nodes is transmitted to the base station through cluster-heads (CHs). As the nodes will communicate data over shorter distances in such an environment, the energy spent in the network is likely to be substantially lower compared to when every sensor communicates directly to the base station. The essential operation in sensor node clustering is to select a set of clusterheads from the set of nodes in the network, and then cluster the remaining nodes with these heads. In this paper, we propose a distributed energy efficient cluster formation (DEECF) algorithm for wireless sensor networks. The cluster-head selection algorithm of DEECF is extended the LEACH’s stochastic cluster-head selection algorithm by considering the additional parameters, the residual energy of the node relative to the residual energy of the network. We also compare our DEECF with LEACH in terms of network lifetime. The simulation results demonstrate that DEECF can achieve high energy efficiency and prolong network lifetime.