Energy of Flat VS Clustering Wireless Sensor Networks: A Comparative Study

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) can be used to collect surrounding data by multi-hop. As sensor networks have the limited and not rechargeable energy resource, energy efficiency is an important design issue for its topology. In this paper, we derive the exact mathematical expression for the flat and clustering schemes, respectively. Then the energy consumption of different schemes are compared. Motivated by the comparison, we propose an energy-efficient multi-tier clustering algorithm EEMC. EEMC terminates in O(log logN) iterations given N nodes, incurs low energy consumption across the network. Simulation results demonstrate that our proposed algorithm is effective in prolonging the large-scale network lifetime and achieving more power reductions.