Fault-tolerant clustering based on neighborhood benchmark score and hop number combination in mobile sensor network

Because of nodes mobility, one of important and fundamental issues in mobile sensor networks is how to cluster the nodes in network. The clustering is a method for best managing nodes energies, data collecting and sending information to base station and increasing network lifetime. In a wireless mobile network, the created clusters change continually and the nodes move from one cluster to another, constantly. Therefore, using fault tolerant methods capable to creating new clusters while the moving of nodes between clusters, will be necessary. One of clustering methods in mobile Ad-Hoc networks is based on neighborhood benchmark in which, the cluster heads are selected based on maximum connection degree and minimum fault in a specific time period. In this paper, the improvement of mentioned method in term of increasing network lifetime, based on its combination with minimum hop number to cluster head, will be considered. With using this new method, having symmetric and balanced-sized clusters with cluster heads that have most communications and least faults, will be possible.