Energy Efficient Hybrid Multihop Clustering Algorithm in Wireless Sensor Networks

In wireless sensor networks, clustering approach provides an efficient method for minimizing energy utilization and maximizing system lifetime. The issue of identifying appropriate cluster heads (CHs), forming energy efficient clusters and transmitting data packets to base station (BS) by direct or multi hop are important problems. This paper presents two approaches for two different scenarios. First, Energy Efficient Hybrid Clustering Scheme (EEHCS) is for direct hop communication to the BS when BS is situated within the sensing region and second, Energy Efficient Hybrid Multi-hop Clustering Scheme (EEHMCS) is for multi-hop communication to the BS using other CHs when BS is situated far away from the deployment region. In both the approaches, BS selects energy efficient CHs depending on remaining energy and number of member nodes by a centralized CH election method and broadcasts the selected CH message to all the nodes to reduce the control messages overhead required for distributed clustering approach. Simulation results show that EEHCS prolong the network lifetime upto 27 : 63% over LEACH-C, whereas, EEHMCS performs 2 times better