Energy-Efficient and Coverage-Guaranteed Unequal-Sized Clustering for Wireless Sensor Networks

In the last years, due to the limited resources of consumer products, energy-saving is known as one of the design challenges of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Clustering is a practical technique to enhance the performance of the network including energy efficiency, network scalability, and network easier management. In cluster-based networks, the size of clusters has a key role in the network power consumption. Non-optimized clustering results in increasing the power consumption of the whole network. The small size clusters leads to appear coverage hole in the network, as well as this property is the opposite of being the scalability of the network. In addition, in non-optimized clusters, reducing the energy consumption of the nodes as the key objective of clustering, cannot be pursued, thus the clustering will result contrary. Consequently, the energy consumption reduction after clustering can be guaranteed by considering the power consumption of nodes before clustering in cluster size optimization. Hence, in this paper, an Energy-efficient and Coverage-guaranteed Unequal-sized Clustering (ECUC) scheme is proposed which considers both energy and coverage issues simultaneously in optimizing the cluster size. Based on the simulation results, the proposed scheme remarkably enhances the network lifetime by reducing the total dissipated energy while guarantying the coverage issue.