Chain based Conical Clustering (CCC) framework for data gathering in WSNs

Non uniform energy consumption of the nodes is a major area of concern in cluster based data gathering architectures proposed for wireless sensor networks in the literature and is an active area of research over recent past years. The solutions suggested in the literature, for uniform distribution of energy consumption, require rotation of clusterhead role among sensor nodes but every such rotation needs reclustering of the nodes in the network. The overhead associated with such reclustering are not actual part of data gathering activities and consume energy unnecessarily only for creating and maintaining the clusters. To avoid such unnecessary wastage of energy, due to forced reclustering associated with the clusterhead role rotation, a new hybrid clustering framework, chain based conical clustering (CCC) scheme, is proposed in this paper. CCC keeps the cluster stable and rotates the clusterhead role among the cluster members using layered chains of these cluster members. It is proved, theoretically, that CCC is expected to outperform the scheme used as a benchmark, in the clustered data gathering performance comparison, in wireless sensor network literature.