Design Challenges for Optimizing the Performance of Energy Constrained Wireless Sensor Networks

Prolonged network lifetime, scalability and reliability are the most common requirements for many ad-hoc sensor network applications. Clustering sensor nodes is an effective technique to achieve these goals. This paper assumes a heterogeneous network structure where nodes with higher capabilities act as cluster heads and others as members of the cluster. Nodes use multi hopping to reach the cluster heads and hence the cluster heads and the nodes closest to them decide the lifetime of the network. The contributions of this paper are: (i) it outlines the design issues to be considered in optimizing the performance of large-scale wireless sensor networks operating under energy and reliability constraints, (ii) It provides a model to calculate the optimum number of clusters to guarantee a minimum lifetime and validates the model using a simulation study