E/sup 2/LBC: an energy efficient load balanced clustering technique for heterogeneous wireless sensor networks

Energy efficiency is of paramount interest to most of the wireless sensor network applications. In a clustered sensor network, some of the nodes become cluster heads, aggregate the data of their cluster members and transmit it to the sink. In this study, we assume a heterogeneous network setup, where a fixed percentage of the population of sensor nodes is equipped with additional energy resources thus acting as cluster heads (two level hierarchy). The behavior of such sensor networks becomes very unstable once the first head dies. Classical clustering techniques for wireless sensor networks pay much importance to reducing the per-node energy consumption, which may not always guarantee a globally efficient solution. We propose E
²
LBC, which considers energy efficiency as a system-wide issue that focuses on improving the overall stability of operation of a wireless sensor network. We prolong the stability period of the network by balancing the load at each cluster head. We prove the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm by comparing it against a hypothetical unbalanced clustering protocol