Sustainable Clustering for Energy Harvesting Sensor Networks

Energy harvesting capability makes it possible to maintain network sustainability for wireless sensor networks. Due to the dynamics and instability of energy, it is significant to efficiently utilize the harvested part to keep the network sustainability. In this work, a Sustainable Clustering Protocol (SCP) is devised to provide continuous and timely data collection for sensor networks with ambient energy harvesting, such as solar power. In SCP, cluster heads (CHs) are only responsible for cluster coordination within clusters. In addition, cluster relays (CRs) are selected to share the data aggregation and long-haul forwarding responsibilities of original CHs. Consequently, network infrastructure is stably maintained since only intra-cluster CRs instead of CHs are selected periodically, which in turn decreases control overhead. Simulation results show that sustainable clustering can efficiently balance the energy consumption of all nodes and improve the sustainability of network compared to traditional clustering protocols.