A Self Organizing Multihop Clustering Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) self organization protocols are designed to build interconnection links among sensor nodes to create a manageable structure after the initial deployment. During the organization, clustering is a preferred way to achieve scalability. Because of the wireless transmission range and density limitations, connectivity and coverage per cluster can be improved with multihop links. [13] is one of the self organizing protocols in literature proposing “persistent”, a message efficient multihop clustering algorithm, together with a network decomposition method based on cluster initiator timers. In this paper, we have proposed a self organizing multihop clustering protocol which is also based on persistent algorithm. Different from the timer based approach in [13], our network decomposition is achieved by iterative local decisions and builds intercluster links while initiating new clusters. We have provided protocol details and investigated its performance by comparing simulation results with timer based approach in terms of amount of clusters created, message complexity and configuration time. Even though it has a slightly higher message complexity due to extra messages needed to generate intercluster links, the new protocol has a better clustering performance and operates well in low node densities. Configuration is much faster and the system scales well as the network size increases.