Efficient data gathering in WSN using fuzzy C means and ant colony optimization

Monitoring and controlling difficult terrains in a timely manner are a major application area of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN). Usually such areas are unreachable rendering battery change of sensor nodes infeasible. So data gathering protocols should be energy efficient to elongate WSN lifetime. We propose a data gathering method coined as FCM-DS-ACO which uses fuzzy c means (FCM) to cluster the sensor nodes. The dominating set (DS) for each cluster is found out and ant colony optimization (ACO) is used to form cluster chains out of the DS. Chain leader (CL) for each cluster chain is selected based on its residual energy and proximity to base station (BS). Data is aggregated as it moves along the cluster chain to CL which transmits it directly to BS. Matlab simulations reveal that FCM-DS-ACO outperforms LEACH, LEACH-C and PEGASIS in extending network lifetime and at the same time providing good percentage coverage of the deployment area. Our results are shown to be statistically significant.