A message-passing approach to min-cost distributed clustering in wireless sensor networks

Clustering is an effective approach to hierarchically organizing network topology for efficient data aggregation in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). In this paper, we present a new approach to energy-efficient, distributed clustering in WSNs using the recent modeling and computational methodology of factor graphs and message-passings. We first formulate the sensor clustering as an optimization problem that minimizes the total data transmission cost weighted by node residual energy. We then derive simplified, localized, min-sum recursive message-passing rules which can elect a near-optimal set of cluster heads. We show through simulations that the proposed algorithm quickly achieves a good approximation of the minimum cost found by a centralized algorithm, and effectively prolongs the network lifetime compared to a popular sensor clustering algorithm.