A DISTRIBUTED ENERGY EFFICIENT CLUSTERING ALGORITHM FOR DATA AGGREGATION IN WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are a new generation of networks typically consisting of a large number of inexpensive nodes with wireless communications. The main purpose of these networks is to collect information from the environment for further processing. Nodes in the network have been equipped with limited battery lifetime, so energy saving is one of the major issues in WSNs. If we balance the load among cluster heads and prevent having an extra load on just a few nodes in the network, we can reach longer network lifetime. One solution to control energy consumption and balance the load among nodes is to use clustering techniques. In this paper, we propose a new distributed energy-efficient clustering algorithm for data aggregation in wireless sensor networks, called Distributed Clustering for Data Aggregation (DCDA). In our new approach, an optimal transmission tree is constructed among sensor nodes with a new greedy method. Base station (BS) is the root, cluster heads (CHs) and relay nodes are intermediate nodes, and other nodes (cluster member nodes) are the leaves of this transmission tree. DCDA balances load among CHs in intracluster and inter-cluster data communications using different cluster sizes. For efficient inter-cluster communications, some relay nodes will transfer data between CHs. Energy consumption, distance to the base station, and cluster heads' centric metric are three main adjustment parameters for the cluster heads election. Simulation results show that the proposed protocol leads to the reduction of individual sensor nodes' energy consumption and prolongs network lifetime, in comparison with other known methods.