Efficient Overlay Construction for Wireless Sensor Networks

In this paper, we propose a new algorithm for efficient overlay construction for wireless sensor networks to minimize energy consumption thereby enhancing the network lifetime. In the proposed algorithm, sensor nodes are grouped into clusters of unequal size and the selection of cluster heads (CHs) depends on their residual energy. To route the data to the sink, a routing overlay (RO) of the CHs is constructed and this is done only once during the lifetime of the network. We devise an efficient data relaying strategy to balance the energy consumption of the CHs in the RO. The proposed algorithm also replaces a CH and reconfigures the RO by making decision locally. We perform extensive experiments through simulation run. The simulation results are compared with the existing algorithms which show that the proposed algorithm outperforms in terms of network lifetime, energy consumption and other performance metrics.