Clustering Approach to Minimize the Consumed Energy in WSNs

Saving energy or energy consumption represents the essential problem in the process of designing, deploying and operating any wireless sensor networks (WSN). Most of the available produced sensors depend on a limited power supply battery in all their operations. Most of the sensors can perform the process of sensing, data processing and wireless communication. Sensors can achieve various duties in WSNs according to their wanted applications. In most applications sensors are ordered into sets called clusters according to the network objective and its requirements. Clustering achieved many advantages, so it represents the first preferable approach in designing or improving any WSN. Each cluster includes one leader sensor node known as a cluster head (CH) and the other sensors known as member nodes. In most applications the sensor node with higher energy is preferred to be a CH to perform the process of data transmission and data processing while those with low energy are preferred to achieve the sensing task as cluster members. Simulation being the unique tool in evaluating and estimating the performance metrics of any new designed WSN. In this study, a main effort is made to study the effect of clustering approaches on the WSNs consumed energy. Many clustering approaches is simulated and evaluated with a developed suggested clustering approach. Three approaches were suggested, built and simulated to estimate the WSNs lifetime with their important behaviors parameters. Net Logo (5.2.1) as multi-agent programming language is suggested to be the simulation tool in this study.