An energy-balanced lifetime enhancing clustering for WSN (EBLEC)

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have emerged as an important application area resulting from the advancement of efficient short-range radio communication and miniaturization of computing devices. Nodes in a WSN are deployed with limited battery energy and therefore enhancement of network lifetime by minimizing energy-usage is of utmost importance. One of the solutions to reduce such energy-usage is clustering of network nodes. In this paper a clustering scheme in WSN is proposed where cluster heads are selected based on relative contribution of the nodes towards keeping the network alive for an extended period of time by balancing energy consumption. The contribution is measured not only based on residual energy of the nodes but also on their relative positions in the cluster. Performance of the scheme is measured in terms of network lifetime. Exhaustive simulation is performed varying different parameters that greatly influence network lifetime. Results in each case are compared with an existing clustering scheme that shows the present scheme outperforms the existing one.