CFL: A clustering algorithm for localization in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are a new type of communication networks which consist of some small sensor nodes which are distributed in an area and are responsible to gather information from their environments. The collected information is transferred to a base station which is called sink node. Having minimum energy consumption an maximum lifetime are two important objectives in WSNs. Clustering is a standard approach for achieving efficient and scalable performance in this type of networks. It facilitates the distribution of control over the network and, hence, enables locality of communication. In this paper, we propose a clustering algorithm called CFL (clustering for localization). CFL is designed in such a way to consider principle of designing a clustering algorithm, in addition to providing an environment for designing a localization algorithm based on clustering. The proposed algorithm uses a combined weight function and tries to classify the sensor nodes so that minimum number of clusters with maximum number of nodes in each cluster could be achieved. The simulation results confirm that the proposed CFL algorithm has better performance than that of the existing algorithms.