An Energy Aware Clustering Algorithm for Data Aggregation in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are widely employed in numerous important and useful applications in recent years. Energy conservation and energy efficiency are the crucial research areas as they deal with lifetime of the network which is the most important problem in WSNs. Many clustering and routing approaches have been proposed for energy efficient data transmission in WSNs. This paper deals with an Improved Particle Swarm Optimization (IPSO) for clustering and cluster head (CH) election accompanied by data aggregation technique in wireless sensor networks. The cluster head nodes are elected based upon the residual energy of nodes, intra-cluster distance and distance to sink. Data aggregation is performed at CH for minimizing excess energy consumption within the network. The proposed technique is compared with traditional PSO approach and performance metrics being average energy consumption, network lifetime, packet delivery rate, packet loss rate and average delay are evaluated. The proposed method is found to be relatively superior to the conventional method with an increase of 12% in network lifetime and up-to 64% increase in packet delivery rate and a decrease of 6% in energy consumption.