Prolonging the lifetime of wireless sensor network via multihop clustering

Wireless nodes in sensor network detect surrounding events and then deliver the sensed information to a base station. Organizing these sensors into clusters enables efficient utilization of the limited network resources. Many clustering algorithms have been proposed such as LEACH, HEED, GAF and so on. While LEACH has many excellent features such as highly adaptive, self-configuring cluster formation, application-specific data aggregation, etc., it does not scale well when the network size or coverage increases. In this paper, the Enhanced Multihop Clustering Algorithm (EMCA) is proposed which utilizes multihop links for both intra-cluster and inter-cluster communication. To model the energy consumption more accurately, each cluster is modeled as a Voronoi Cell instead of a circle. The optimal parameter values axe determined to minimize the total energy consumption so as to prolonging the lifetime of the whole network. Numerical results show that when both LEACH and EMCA operate with optimal parameter values, the total energy consumption of EMCA is much smaller than that of LEACH. Moreover, EMCA scales much well when the network scale increases, which proves that EMCA is highly scalable and is especially suitable for relatively large-scale wireless sensor networks.