A New Flow Network Approach for Improving Clustering Protocols in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) consist in a set of sensor nodes that collect data in the environment and send it to a Base Station that processes the final data. Some challenges may be found, such as minimizing energy consumption and maximize the network lifetime. Many protocols achieve energy savings through network clustering. This paper presents a new modeling graph using flow network to improve the routing protocols using the clustering technique, improving the routing of data between clusters-head, as well as by setting a time for a round in the clustering process. With this agnostic technique, our proposal may increase the network lifetime, balance the power consumption among the nodes and better distribute the data transmissions. Through simulations in network simulator Omnet++, Castalia, the proposal is validated and its efficiency is verified by comparing it to other protocols which work with clustering techniques.