Performance evaluation of load-balanced clustering of wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks have received increasing attention in recent few years. In many military and civil applications of sensor networks, sensors are constrained in onboard energy supply and are left unattended. Energy, size and cost constraints of such sensors limit the communication range. Therefore, multi-hop wireless connectivity is required to forward data on their behalf to a remote command site. In this paper, we investigate the performance of an algorithm to network these sensors into well defined clusters with less-energy-constrained gateway nodes acting as clusterheads as well as to balance the load among these gateways. Load balanced clustering increases the system stability and improves the communication between different nodes in the system. To evaluate the efficiency of this approach, we studied the performance of sensor networks by applying various different routing protocols. Simulation results shows that irrespective of the routing protocol used, this approach improves the lifetime of the system.