Mobility-centric energy efficient and fault tolerant clustering protocol of wireless sensor network

Abstract

This paper introduces a Mobility-centric Energy efficient and Fault tolerant Clustering protocol (MEFC) for Wireless Sensor Network that minimizes the number of cluster heads and active nodes to provide network coverage. Most existing routing protocols of WSN do not support mobile sensor nodes and are not fault tolerant. Considering the real world mobility-centric sensor applications the MEFC protocol allows the base station to control the mobility of sensor nodes so that they move to a new location to provide network coverage to be used in coverage-sensitive applications, e.g., battlefield surveillance. It also allows nodes to move inside or outside of a cluster and join a new cluster in data-centric applications, e.g., health monitoring for elderly people. The base station and cluster heads transmit beacon messages to discover the failure of cluster heads and member nodes of a cluster, respectively. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed MEFC protocol reduces network energy consumptions and increased network lifetime as compared to the existing FT-EEC, DSC and LEACH protocols.