MEPA: A New Protocol for Energy-Efficient, Distributed Clustering in Wireless Sensor Networks

Clustering is an effective approach to hierarchically organizing network topology for efficient data aggregation in wireless sensor networks. Distributed protocols with simple local computations to accomplish a desired global goal, offer a good prospect for achieving energy efficiency. This paper presents MEPA - an energy-efficient distributed clustering protocol using simple and local message-passing rules. Our proposed clustering protocol combines both node residual energy and network topology features to recursively elect a near-optimal set of cluster heads. Simulation results show that MEPA can produce a set of cluster heads with compelling characteristics, and effectively prolong the network lifetime.