Abstract
Prolonging the network lifetime is one of the fundamental requirements in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Sensor node clustering is a very popular energy conservation strategy in WSNs, allowing to achieve energy efficiency, low latency, and scalability. According to this strategy, sensor nodes are grouped into several clusters, and one sensor node in each cluster is assigned to be a cluster head (CH). The responsibility of each CH is to aggregate data from the other sensor nodes within its cluster and send these data to the sink. However, the distribution of sensor nodes in the sensing region is often non-uniform, which may lead to an unbalanced number of sensor nodes between clusters and thus unbalanced energy consumption between CHs. This, in turn, may result in a reduced network lifetime. Furthermore, a different number of clusters lead to a different quality of service of a WSN system. To address the problems of unbalanced number of sensor nodes between clusters and selecting an optimal number of clusters, this study proposes an energy-balanced cluster-routing protocol (EBCRP) based on particle swarm optimization (PSO) with five mutation operators for WSNs. The five mutation operators are specially proposed to improve the performance of PSO in optimizing sensor node clustering. A rotation CH selection scheme based on the highest residual energy is used to dynamically select a CH for each cluster in each round. Simulation results show that the proposed EBCRP method performs well in balancing energy consumption and prolonging the network lifetime.
Highlights
Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) compose a large number of sensor nodes, which are scattered in the sensing region, and one or more sink nodes [1]
This work proposes an energy-balanced cluster-routing protocol using particle swarm optimization (PSO) with five mutation operators for WSN, which can automatically determine the number of clusters and balance the number of sensor nodes between clusters
The energy consumption balance index (ECBI) of the proposed energy-balanced cluster-routing protocol (EBCRP) method is significantly higher than that of the other methods in different rounds. This is because low-energy adaptive clustering hierarchy (LEACH) and stable election protocol (SEP) randomly select some sensor nodes as cluster head (CH), and other sensor nodes are assigned to their respective nearest CHs, which ignores the balance of the number of sensor nodes between clusters and increases the imbalance of energy consumption between sensor nodes
Summary
Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) compose a large number of sensor nodes, which are scattered in the sensing region, and one or more sink nodes [1]. One of the methods divides the sensing region into many grids (subregions) [10,11,12], with sensor nodes in each grid being regarded as a cluster (Figure 1a) Another popular clustering method called low-energy adaptive clustering hierarchy (LEACH) can prolong the network lifetime [9]. A crucial task for increasing the network lifetime is to adaptively determine the number of clusters and group sensor nodes into clusters evenly according to their distribution This is important to improve the performance of WSN such as the network lifetime. The proposed schemes for balanced clustering scheme and rotation CH selection based on the highest residual energy are helpful in balancing the energy consumption of sensor nodes and prolonging the network lifetime.
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