Optimal Cluster Head Selection and Clustering for WSN Using PSO

Abstract

Nowadays, Wireless Sensor Network is the promising and booming technology used in a variety of applications like disaster monitoring, health care, environmental monitoring, agriculture, industrial automation, etc. However the main drawback of the wireless sensor network is the limited energy source of the sensor nodes. Consequently, efficient utilization of the energy becomes essential for increasing the lifetime of network. Clustering protocol is one of the best energy efficient approach for saving the energy and maximizing the network lifetime. But the improper selection of cluster heads (CHs) may lead to the death of the CHs which deteriorate the performance of the network. Therefore the proper selection of cluster head becomes important for the energy conservation of sensor nodes and to maximize the lifetime of network. In this paper, we have presented PSO based optimal cluster head selection algorithm, in which the best possible CHs are chosen on the basis of parameters like residual energy, intra-cluster distance, and inter-cluster distance of the sensor node. With the effective scheme of particle encoding and fitness function, the proposed PSO algorithm is implemented for reducing the energy consumption and improving lifetime of network. The proposed algorithm also ensures the uniform distribution of the energy over network, by changing the role of CHs after each round. We extend our research to cluster formation approach where the sensor nodes are joined to the CH on the basis distance and energy of cluster head. The proposed algorithm is simulated extensively under various conditions like number of sensor nodes in the field, number of CHs, the position of the base station, constant energy and random energy, etc. and the simulation results are analyzed with the extant algorithms. Under all the circumstances the proposed algorithm outperforms the existing LEACH and SEP protocols in terms of average residual energy, the network lifetime and number of data packets received by the base station. Because of the improvement in the lifetime of the network, the proposed algorithm can be used in the applications like environmental monitoring, agriculture etc.