Self-organization of wireless sensor networks based on severity of an emergency environment

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) composed of large numbers of sensor nodes to monitor the environment and collect data. Self-organization of sensor nodes has been widely investigated to enhance the quality of service provided by WSNs. This paper proposes a Severity based Clustering Algorithm for Emergency (SCAE) for WSNs. The residual energy of nodes and severity of the emergency environment are the key parameters of SCAE. The severity of the emergency situation is estimated by using Dempster-Shafer theory. SCAE minimizes the communication loss due to node failures in an emergency environment. This is achieved by delaying the cluster head failures in the network and allocating less priority to non-cluster heads to select their cluster head which might get dropped from the network quickly. Communication failures due to node failures have been minimized successfully by considering the severity of the emergency. Additionally the simulation result shows that the SCAE prolong the network lifetime compared to some existing algorithms.