Energy and Network Balanced Distributed Clustering in Wireless Sensor Network

Abstract

Balancing energy consumption of sensor nodes to extend the network lifetime is a major concern for the energy constrained wireless sensor network. Improper load balance and disproportionate energy consumption of sensor nodes during network activities such as transmitting and receiving of data cause energy hole problem and shorten the lifetime of the network. Many research works cited that clustering mechanism and the use of mobile sink can be effective to mitigate the energy hole problem and can improve the network lifetime. But using a mobile sink causes extra delay which is a major concern if the network is delay bound. In this work, we give deep insight into the problem of disproportionate energy consumption and aim to improve the network load balance and increase the network lifetime by applying efficient distributed clustering method with the help of a mobile sink. The proposed scheme named Energy Balanced Distributed Clustering Protocol (EBDCP) guarantees to transmit the sensed data to the base station within the tour deadline with the aid of a mobile sink. For this purpose, an efficient sojourn point determination algorithm has also been proposed. The simulation results prove that the proposed scheme performs significantly better than the existing works in terms of the energy distribution in the network, clustering overhead, residual energy of the network, number of alive nodes and network lifetime.