Efficient Cluster Heads Selection Based on Index-Modulation in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Index-Modulation (IM) has been recently emerged as a promising direction towards improving error performance and spectral efficiency in wireless networks. To this end, IM-based Wireless Sensor Networks (IM-WSN) has been recently applied as a decision gathering scheme in clustered Wireless Sensor Networks, by which a significant improvement in the decision error rate (DER) is achieved. Later, following the same IM principle, efficient IM-WSN scheme (EIM-WSN) has been introduced, but with the emphasis on reducing the computational complexity of IM-WSN while improving the error performance. Although in these schemes cluster heads (CHs) vary dynamically, still they suffer from the unfair distribution of the CH role among nodes. As a result, nodes energy will be unequally dissipated, and hence the network lifetime will be deteriorated. In this study, aiming at balancing the CH role among cluster nodes, a new decision reporting scheme, namely index-shift, is proposed. The performance of proposed scheme is analysed in terms of DER and network lifetime and compared with the previous IM reporting schemes, IM-WSN and EIM-WSN. Analytical and simulation results show that the proposed scheme demonstrates fair distribution of CH role among all cluster nodes. This, in turn, led to extend the network lifetime up to 50% compared to other schemes, in addition to acheive DER that is better than IM-WSN and almost identical to EIM-WSN.