Energy Efficient Clustering in Wireless Sensor Network

Abstract

Wireless sensor nodes are small sensing devices responsible for sensing some physical or environmental conditions, collect data based on this sensing and then send this data to a remotely located server. A common drawback of sensor nodes is the limited battery life. We need to make sure that this limited energy is utilized properly for the efficiency of the network. One popular concept of wireless sensor networking is called “clustering”, which is to break the entire network into small cells known as “clusters”. Each cluster contains a “cluster-head” node and member nodes, where the cluster-head node contains more energy than the member nodes. These cluster-heads get data from all the member nodes and aggregates them and then send to the cluster-head of another cluster; which eventually sends this data to the remote server. There has to be a way to ensure the efficient utilization of this limited energy of the cluster-heads available so that the network doesn’t get down. In this work, we have attempted to develop and analyze an energy efficient clustering protocol. This protocol seeks to provide efficiency to the wireless sensor network in terms of energy consumption, in a way such that it reduces message transmission from one node to another significantly. This reduces the amount of energy consumed by the cluster-head. Thus it helps the wireless sensor network more energy efficient. We have done the simulation of our proposed scheme using network simulator ns-2 v.2.34. The results demonstrate that our proposed technique achieves better output compared to BCDCP, LEACH-C and PEGASIS protocols.