An Energy Efficient Clustering Protocol for Lifetime Maximization in Wireless Sensor Networks

Maximizing the lifetime is an important issue in the design of applications and protocols for wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Clustering sensor nodes is an effective topology control approach helping achieve this goal. In this paper, we present an energy efficiency protocol to prolong the network lifetime based on an improved particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm. The protocol takes both energy efficiency and transmission distance into consideration, and the relay nodes are used to balance the heavy consumption of cluster heads. In this way, the network results in better distributed sensors and a well-balanced clustering system enhancing the network's lifetime. We compare the proposed protocol with comparative protocols in different scenarios. Simulation results show that the proposed protocol performs well over other comparative protocols in various scenarios.