Energy-efficient clustering scheme for multihop wireless sensor network (ECMS)

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) have emerged recently and gained widespread popularity. The applications of WSN involve remote medical monitoring system, disaster management, security surveillance, and emergency response system. Most of these applications are used in harsh environments where the sensor nodes are operated in an unattended manner. The tiny nodes used for sensing in WSN are battery operated and have limited resources in terms of energy, storage and power. One of the ways to efficiently utilize the energy is to use clustering. Clustering is the way to gather data from group of similar or different items. In this paper we propose an energy efficient scheme, ECMS (Energy-Efficient Clustering scheme for Multihop wireless Sensor networks) for both cluster heads and senor nodes. The proposed scheme works in two phases. In first phase efficient cluster formation is done by using the energy factor and computation of distance between nodes to base station. In second phase gateway nodes are incorporated and used instead of direct communication between cluster head nodes to avoid long distance communications and out of range cluster heads are also communicated using these gateway nodes. The simulation results prove the effectiveness of the proposed scheme towards less energy utilization and enhancement in network life time.