A Fault Tolerant Dynamic Clustering Protocol of Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Energy efficiency in the clustering protocols in highly desired in Wireless Sensor Network (WSN). The Dynamic Static Clustering (DSC) protocol is an energy efficient clustering protocol; however, it does not provide any fault tolerance mechanism. Moreover, the non-Cluster Head nodes send data to the Cluster Heads (CH) in every time slot of a frame allocated to them using TDMA scheme, which is an energy consuming process. Considering these limitations of the DSC protocol, we have proposed a more energy efficient and fault tolerant Dynamic Static Clustering (FT-DSC) protocol of WSN to enhance the performance of DSC. The performance of the proposal protocol has been tested by means of simulation and compared against the original DSC protocol. Simulation results show that the FT-DSC protocol has better performance than the DSC protocol in terms of energy efficiency and reliability.