Efficient cluster head selection for target tracking in wireless sensor network

Efficient sensor nodes organization is one of the most critical and challenging tasks in building practical wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Due to energy efficiency, clustering has been widely used in WSNs, where each cluster head (CH) is a manager to control its members and collect sensed data from them. Currently, various CH selection techniques have been proposed. However, less emphasis was placed on the CH selection considering the application constraints. In order to make the network as efficient as possible, this paper proposes an efficient CH selection approach called ECHS for target tracking sensor networks. ECHS selects nodes on the edge of a cluster as CHs instead of selecting CH at the center of a cluster in traditional clustering approaches. In this way, CHs utilize their energy efficiently because CHs take two roles which are manager and detecting nodes. Moreover, in ECHS, nodes take the role of CH with different times according to their location and residual energy to balance the energy cost in the whole network. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed schemes.