Competition-based Clustering and Energy-saving Data Gathering in wireless sensor networks

A large-scale wireless sensor network can be deployed for a specific application. In such a network, the designed routing algorithms trend to reduce the energy consumption and ex tend the network lifetime, because the energy is highly limited. To achieve this goal, we proposed a Competition-based Clustering and Energy-saving Data Gathering (CCEDG) protocol. The CCEDG consists of two parts: one part is the intra-cluster communication algorithm, another part is the inter-cluster communication algorithm. In phase I of the intra-cluster communication part, we introduce a competition based clustering algorithm. Cluster heads with less residual energy than the average residual energy of all nodes in the network have smaller cluster sizes, thus they can preserve more energy. In phase II of the intra-cluster communication part, each member node tries to find a near neighbor node within the same cluster to set up a data relay link, most member nodes use data relay links to communicate with cluster heads, as the communication distance decrease, more energy saved. In our scheme, it is no longer need the help of GPS or other means. Simulation results show that the scheme achieves a significant amount of energy-savings and obtains an obvious improvement on the network lifetime.