High Powered Cluster Heads for Extending Sensor Network Lifetime

Abstract

Extension of the lifetime for a sensor network is important for most if not all applications. We propose a method to extend network lifetime by introducing several special sensors with higher battery power than normal sensors. We use these special sensors as cluster heads until their battery capacity is reduced to that of a normal sensor node before adopting a Low-Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy (LEACH) type method. It is shown in this work that the network lifetime can be more than doubled when battery mAh of a special sensor is kept at 1500 mAh in comparison to normal sensors of 700 mAh. Comparing our approach with an equivalent LEACH system where the initial total battery capacities are equal in both methods, we achieve an increase of 104.23% in the network lifetime.