Analysis and Optimization of Energy Efficient Cluster Forming for Wireless Sensor Networks

A wireless sensor network (WSN) should operate unattended for a long period of time before battery replacement, therefore characteristics such as self-organization and energy efficiency are of utmost importance to the WSN. One way to meet these requirements is to partition the WSN into clusters, where each cluster managed by a cluster head (CH) covers a number of cluster members. In this paper we provide an analysis of energy consumption in a clustered network and quantify the energy gain of clustering with different number of nodes and traffic levels. Following the analysis we propose a novel clustering protocol which minimizes the energy consumption by selecting less CHs. The proposed protocol also prolongs the lifetime of selected CHs and eases the maintenance of the WSN.