A Social Welfare Theory-Based Energy-Efficient Cluster Head Election Scheme for WSNs

Abstract

Inequality of energy consumption in the wireless sensor networks (WSNs) leads to the decline of energy efficiency and the shortening of the network lifetime. In this article, the social welfare theory is adopted to promote energy equilibrium during the process of Cluster Head (CH) election. To the best of authors' knowledge, it is for the first time that the CH election is controlled by the systematical social theory. To this end, Atkinson's Inequality Measure is applied to elect the optimal CH. Besides, a novel concept of expected energy efficiency welfare is proposed to determine the CH, with the aim of achieving energy equilibrium within each cluster. Subsequently, a novel Social Welfare theory-based Energy-efficient Cluster head Election (SWECE) scheme is proposed and detailed. Finally, extensive experiments are conducted to evaluate its performance with regards to energy efficiency and network lifetime by extensive comparisons with the existing classic and the latest intelligent clustering strategies. The results have verified its effectiveness on improving energy efficiency and prolonging the network lifespan of WSNs.