Distributed Clustering Around Relay Nodes in Sensor Networks

Two-tiered sensor networks, where higher-powered relay nodes are used as cluster heads, have been proposed for load-balanced, scalable network design. It has been shown that, in such networks, the assignment of sensor nodes to clusters plays an important role in determining the network lifetime. In this paper we propose an energy-aware distributed clustering algorithm for organizing sensor nodes into clusters around high- powered relay nodes in two-tiered networks. The advantages of our approach are that it operates based on local information only, requires no centralized control and relatively low communication overhead. Simulations on networks with different sizes show that the solutions generated by our algorithm clearly outperform existing heuristics and lie within 10%-15% of the optimal solutions obtained using a centralized ILP formulation.