A base station centralized simple clustering protocol for sensor networks

Sensor nodes in wireless sensor network are severely energy-constrained. This has been a key factor to limit its performance. So far, many energy-efficient routing protocols have been proposed. Cluster-based routing protocols have been paid much attention because of their advantages. However, the cluster-based routing protocols require information on the locations of the sensor nodes in the network to construct clusters. Due to cost, it is not feasible to know the locations of all sensor nodes in the network. In this paper, we propose a base station centralized simple clustering protocol (BCSP) which requires no location information of the sensor nodes. Instead, BCSP utilizes information on the remaining energy of each sensor node and the number of cluster heads which is changed depending on the circumstance of the sensor network. From performance experiments, BCSP shows better performance than low-energy adaptive clustering hierarchy (LEACH).