Energy Consumption Control for Large Scale Sensor Networks Using Partition Energy Balanced Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy Scheme

Segmentation of wireless sensor networks into clusters is a promising approach for efficient utilization and distribution of the limited energy resources within the deployed sensor nodes. In actual implementations, however, there are potential drawbacks that the unbalanced energy assignment and node´s physical communication range limitation may restrict the node´s operation, and in turn affect the performance of the entire network. In this paper, we propose a novel clustering algorithm named partition energy balanced adaptive clustering hierarchy (PEBACH), which is specially tailored for periodical data gathering applications. For this approach, the cluster heads of each partition of the network are elected based on the residual energy and their relative distance to the region of interest. Such a scheme overcomes the unbalanced energy assignment and node´s physical communication range limitation discussed in previous work. Simulation results show that PEBACH outperforms other protocols significantly in prolonging the network lifetime, enlarging the node number, and simultaneously maintains the normal communication range for the nodes.