Self-organized energy conscious clustering protocol for wireless sensor networks

Wireless Sensor Networks have been evolved and applied to industrial, commercial, defense and civil applications. Energy is the main constraint in sensor networks. Energy management techniques increases the life cycle of sensor network and enhances the performance of throughput. Multi-hop communication and clustering approaches are used to save the node energy in sensor networks. Energy aware protocols minimize the participation of sensor nodes with less threshold energy and selects optimal energy path. In sensor networks, Cluster Heads (CHs) collect data from the sensor nodes and forward it to the neighboring CHs and finally to the Base Station (BS). CHs contribute to save the node energy. Cluster management techniques aim to minimize the number of clusters, density of clusters and energy consumption per cluster. In this article, we propose Self-organized Energy Conscious Clustering protocol (SECC) for WSNs to group the sensor network into clusters based on node energy and node distance. If the node energy is below the threshold value, SECC forms self-organized clusters and re-organizes the sensor network. Nodes with energy attributes less than the threshold value are eliminated from the clusters to maintain energy efficient sensor network. Energy aware cluster management in SECC is based on node parameters (like node distance, node energy, node density) and cluster parameters (like cluster density, sensor nodes per cluster). Performance analysis and simulation results are given with variations in number of clusters, energy levels and node distance.