An Efficient Multi-Parameter Group Leader Selection Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks

Future wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are predicted to use thousands of sensor nodes. Moreover due to the limited resources of sensor nodes a core challenge is how to prolong WSN lifetime. Group-based or cluster-based approaches are well known methods used to enhance the lifetime and performance of such large scale networks. For these approaches each group leader in a group of nodes plays an important role in gathering data from member nodes, aggregating it and sending the information to the sink. These activities reduce the amount of data transmitted between source and destination nodes, thereby conserving energy. A major challenge in group-based WSNs is to select an appropriate new group leader in an efficient manner after failure or resource depletion of the existing group leader node. In this paper we propose a novel group leader selection scheme for WSNs which is based on four different selection parameters: available energy, number of neighbouring sensor nodes, distance from the current group leader and level of trust. We also analysed and found that the positioning of the group leader had a significant effect on the amount of energy consumed by the group overall. Simulation results demonstrate that our proposed scheme is effective in prolonging the lifetime of a WSN as compared to existing schemes.