Optimal energy aware clustering in circular wireless sensor networks

The lifetime of a wireless sensor node refers to the duration after which the node's energy has ended. Since battery replacement in most applications of wireless sensor networks is not possible, designing an energy-efficient communication protocol in these networks is very important. Therefore, many studies have been conducted to find a solution to increase the lifetime of these networks. Clustering is a useful technique for partitioning the network to areas, called clusters and entrusting energy-waste issues (e.g. data gathering, aggregating and routing to the sink) to some specific nodes, the cluster heads. In this paper, a new method for Optimal Clustering in Circular Networks (OCCN) is proposed which aims to mitigate energy consumption and increase the lifetime of wireless sensor networks. In this method, which is proposed for a circular area surrounding a sink, one hop communication between the cluster heads and the sink is replaced by an optimal multi-hop communications. Moreover, the optimal number of clusters is computed and the energy consumption is optimized by partitioning the network into nearly the same size clusters in a distributed manner. Simulation results indicate that the proposed method achieved more than 35% improvements in terms of energy consumption in comparison to other well-known clustering techniques. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.