Directed Budget-Based Clustering for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks are typically bound to operate autonomously on a field, under severe energy constraints and without any centralized control. It is thus essential to develop self organization protocols/algorithms which enable the autonomous, distributed and energy efficient network self organization. Budget based clustering approaches have recently been proposed for this purpose, by specifying rules for distributing a given budget of tokens to neighbors. In this paper, two strictly localized, budget based clustering algorithms are pro posed: the directed budget based (DBB) and directed budget based with random delays (DBB-RD). The basic, innovative idea is to utilize clustering status information that can be readily available (e.g. through the HELLO exchanges) to reduce or eliminate token distribution contentions (both intra and inter cluster) that severely limit the effectiveness of earlier budget based approaches. Simulation results are presented demonstrating a substantial improvement over the earlier approaches with respect to the achieved cluster sizes and time to complete network decomposition