An Energy-Efficient Distributed Clustering Approach in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Clustering the sensor nodes is one of the most popular and effective approaches for applications that must support hundreds or thousands of nodes. The conventional algorithms consider various parameters to evenly distribute the energy load. However, energy consumption problem of the cluster head still remains. In this paper, we propose a novel clustering approach that periodically elects cluster heads with assistant nodes. The assistant nodes substitute for each cluster head to transmit sensor readings to the base station. Performance evaluations show that our proposed clustering algorithm achieves about 10-40% better performance than the existing clustering algorithms in terms of lifetime.