Highly Scalable Multihop Clustering Algorithm for Wireless Sensor Networks

With the recent advancement in wireless sensor networks (WSN), it is anticipated that these networks will be deployed in large scale in the near future. For typical WSN applications, such as military surveillance, environmental monitoring, etc., it is required that the network itself is large scale, in terms of either nodes density/number or service coverage area. Clustering topology enables efficient utilization of the limited network resources. In this paper, we propose the enhanced multihop clustering algorithm (EMCA) which utilizes multihop links for both intra-cluster & inter-cluster communication. Flow graph and TDMA scheduling of EMCA are also presented. We deduce the optimal parameter values to minimize the total energy consumption of the whole network. Results show that when both LEACH and EMCA operate with optimal parameter values, the total energy consumption of EMCA is much smaller. Additionally, it is also proved that EMCA is highly scalable when the network scale increases. Thus, EMCA is especially suitable for relatively large-scale WSNs