Energy-efficient distributed clustering in wireless sensor networks

The deployment of wireless sensor networks in many application areas requires self-organization of the network nodes into clusters. Clustering is a network management technique, since it creates a hierarchical structure over a flat network. Quite a lot of node clustering techniques have appeared in the literature, and roughly fall into two families: those based on the construction of a dominating set and those which are based solely on energy considerations. The former family suffers from the fact that only a small subset of the network nodes are responsible for relaying the messages, and thus cause rapid consumption of the energy of these nodes. The latter family uses the residual energy of each node in order to decide about whether it will elect itself as a leader of a cluster or not. This family's methods ignore topological features of the nodes and are used in combination with the methods of the former family. We propose an energy-efficient distributed clustering protocol for wireless sensor networks, based on a metric for characterizing the significance of a node, w.r.t. its contribution in relaying messages. The protocol achieves small communication complexity and linear computation complexity. Experimental results attest that the protocol improves network longevity. (C) 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.