Impacts of Correlation and Observer Location on Clustered Wireless Sensor Networks

Dense deployment and unattended nature of wireless sensor network (WSNs) make it quite difficult to recharge node battery resulting in the need for an energy efficient solution at each layer of the protocol stack. At network layer, clustering is known as an effective technique for efficient organization of network topology for the purpose of load balancing and prolonging the network lifetime by assuming the full aggregation at the cluster head for a fixed location of observer from the scenario. In this paper, we analyze the performance of cluster based routing protocol under varying distance of observer from the scenario and compute an upper limit on network lifetime under clustered WSNs. Furthermore instead of assuming the full correlation among the sensed data we analyze the performance under varying degree of correlation and our simulation results show that even under low correlation among sensed data i.e. if formed cluster does not lie within isocluster of observed phenomenon, good performance can be expected from the clustered WSNs when observer is situated sufficiently far distance away from the scenario. Furthermore we find that the maximum lifetime under clustered WSNs is controlled by optimal value of the aggregation factor and observer location.