An Approach to Hybrid Clustering and Routing in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks have been widely studied and usefully employed in many applications such as medical monitoring, automotive safety and space applications. Typically, sensor nodes have several limitations such as limited battery life, low computational capability, short radio transmission range and small memory space. However, the most severe constraint of the nodes is their limited energy resource because they cease to function when their battery has been depleted. To reduce energy usage in wireless sensor networks, many cluster-based routings have been proposed. Among those proposed, LEACH (Low Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy) is a well-known cluster-based sensor network architecture which aims to distribute energy consumption evenly to every node in a given network. This clustering technique requires a predefined number of clusters and has been developed with an assumption that the sensor nodes are uniformly distributed through out the network. In this paper, we propose a hybrid clustering and routing architecture for wireless sensor networks. There are three main parts in our proposed architecture which are a modified subtractive clustering technique, an energy-aware cluster head selection method and a cost-based routing algorithm. These are all centralized techniques and are expected to be executed at the base station.