Abstract
With the growing popularity of wireless sensor networks, network stability has become a key area of current research. Different applications of wireless sensor networks demand stable sensing, coverage, and connectivity throughout their operational periods. In some cases, the death of just a single sensor node might disrupt the stability of the entire network. Therefore, a number of techniques have been proposed to improve the network stability. Clustering is one of the most commonly used techniques in this regard. Most clustering techniques assume the presence of high power sensor nodes called relay nodes and implicitly assume that these relay nodes serve as cluster heads in the network. This assumption may lead to faulty network behavior when any of the relay nodes becomes unavailable to its followers. Moreover, relay node based clustering techniques do not address the heterogeneity of sensor nodes in terms of their residual energies, which frequently occur during the operation of a network. To address these two issues, we present a novel clustering technique, Dynamic Clustering with Relay Nodes (DCRN), by considering the heterogeneity in residual battery capacity and by removing the assumption that relay nodes always serve as cluster-heads. We use an essence of the underlying mechanism of LEACH (Low-Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy), which is one of the most popular clustering solutions for wireless sensor networks. In our work, we present four heuristics to increase network stability periods in terms of the time elapsed before the death of the first node in the network. Based on the proposed heuristics, we devise an algorithm for DCRN and formulate a mathematical model for its long-term rate of energy consumption. Further, we calculate the optimal percentage of relay nodes from our mathematical model. Finally, we verify the efficiency of DCRN and correctness of the mathematical model by exhaustive simulation results. Our simulation results reveal that DCRN enhances the network stability period by a significant margin in comparison to LEACH and its best-known variant.
Highlights
With the emergence of highly dense fabrication technology and low production costs, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) prove to be useful in a myriad of diversified applications
Deployment of relay nodes can enhance the potential to a great extent if they are considered in a suitable way during the clustering mechanism
We propose a novel dynamic, self-organizing, and adaptive technique Dynamic Clustering with Relay Nodes (DCRN) to cluster sensor nodes in WSN with relay nodes to exploit the potential
Summary
With the emergence of highly dense fabrication technology and low production costs, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) prove to be useful in a myriad of diversified applications. Regardless of the data collection technique used, WSNs must operate in a stable manner. This stability is especially important in applications such as security monitoring and motion tracking. Each sensor node must efficiently use its available energy in order to improve the lifetime of the WSN. Different techniques have been proposed to ensure efficient usage of the available energy in a sensor node. Dynamic clustering techniques are more useful for WSNs because they can exploit the dynamic variation in residual energies of the sensor nodes, and can maximize network lifetime to a great extent. We use LEACH [2], a simple but popular dynamic clustering technique used in WSNs, as the underlying approach of DCRN. Simulation results show that DCRN achieves a significant improvement in network stability over LEACH and its best variant
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