Energy-Efficient Clustering with One Time Setup for Wireless Sensor Networks

A wireless sensor network (WSN) consists of a lot of inexpensive sensors that have a limited energy resource. Many applications including environment monitoring use a clustering approach for efficient energy consumption. LEACH (Low Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy) is the most famous one of clustering protocols, which enables the balanced consumption of energy to prolong network lifetime. In LEACH, however, additional energy and time are consumed to reform clusters at the setup phase of every round. This side effect is worse as the number of clusters increases. This paper presents a novel energy-efficient clustering scheme to remove cluster reforming process required at every round after the first round, which is called COTS (Clustering with One Time Setup). The proposed COTS allows that the role of cluster head is rotated among members in a cluster without cluster reforming process. This significantly saves the energy because the cluster reforming process is not necessary, resulting in increased network lifetime. According to our simulation study, the network performance and lifetime are improved much better as the number of clusters is increased.