Asynchronous Clustering of Multihop Wireless Sensor Networks

Node clustering has been widely studied in recent years for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) as a technique to form a hierarchical structure and prolong network lifetime by reducing the number of packet transmissions. Cluster Heads (CH) are elected in a distributed way among sensors, but are often highly overloaded, and therefore re-clustering operations should be performed to share the resource intensive CH-role. Existing protocols involve periodic network-wide re-clustering operations that are simultaneously performed, which requires global time synchronisation. To address this issue, some recent studies have proposed asynchronous node clustering for networks with direct links from CHs to the data sink. However, for large-scale WSNs, multihop packet delivery to the sink is required since long-range transmissions are costly for sensor nodes. In this paper, we present an asynchronous node clustering protocol designed for multihop WSNs, considering dynamic conditions such as residual node energy levels and unbalanced data traffic loads caused by packet forwarding. Simulation results demonstrate that it is possible to achieve similar levels of lifetitne extension by reclustering a multihop WSN via independently made decisions at CHs, without a need for time synchronisation required by existing synchronous protocols.