An Energy-Aware Hierarchical Architecture Design Scheme

Comparing with the flat architecture in the design of sensor networks, the hierarchical architecture is much attractive for the reason of scalability, management and energy efficiency. In order to distribute the energy evenly, nodes act the cluster head in some orders. The existing approaches don't pay critical attention to the overhead during the role rotations. And the duration of a round is a priori, which is very application-specific. An energy-aware hierarchical architecture design scheme is put forward in this paper, namely, adaptive minimum rotational cost (AMRC) cluster formation scheme. The decision of beginning a new round is made adaptively by the cluster head itself. It combines the dynamic and static advantages in the clustering architecture. The simulation results demonstrate AMRC outperforms some other clustering protocols in many aspects