Abstract
Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) typically include thousands of resource-constrained sensors to monitor their surroundings, collect data, and transfer it to remote servers for further processing. Although WSNs are considered highly flexible ad-hoc networks, network management has been a fundamental challenge in these types of networks given the deployment size and the associated quality concerns such as resource management, scalability, and reliability. Topology management is considered a viable technique to address these concerns. Clustering is the most well-known topology management method in WSNs, grouping nodes to manage them and/or executing various tasks in a distributed manner, such as resource management. Although clustering techniques are mainly known to improve energy consumption, there are various quality-driven objectives that can be realized through clustering. In this paper, we review comprehensively existing WSN clustering techniques, their objectives and the network properties supported by those techniques. After refining more than 500 clustering techniques, we extract about 215 of them as the most important ones, which we further review, catergorize and classify based on clustering objectives and also the network properties such as mobility and heterogeneity. In addition, statistics are provided based on the chosen metrics, providing highly useful insights into the design of clustering techniques in WSNs.
Highlights
Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are a type of ad-hoc network technology which emerged more than 20 years ago [1] for monitoring purposes in military applications [2]
Clustering is mainly known as a technique to improve energy consumption, clustering can solve various networking challenges, e.g., load balancing, Quality of Service (QoS), security, and mobility management
We surveyed the objectives of clustering techniques in WSNs to investigate the current direction of clustering techniques, more than 20 years after the introduction of the first important clustering technique
Summary
Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are a type of ad-hoc network technology which emerged more than 20 years ago [1] for monitoring purposes in military applications [2]. To the best of our knowledge, no survey paper studies existing clustering techniques with respect to the WSN network properties that they support, such as heterogeneity and mobility. This motivated us to provide a comprehensive survey on objectives of clustering in WSNs. In this paper, WSN-based clustering techniques are reviewed based on the objectives achieved by clustering such as QoS, fault tolerance, load balancing, etc. We analyse the research direction on clustering techniques and provide a statistical model to motivate scientists to utilize clustering in addressing network management challenges This survey allows finding and evaluating clustering techniques that support a given set of objectives.
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