An adaptive distributed re-clustering scheme for mobile wireless sensor networks

In wireless sensor networks, hierarchical clustering schemes have been widely used to enhance the quality of service. However, in mobile wireless sensor networks, node mobility dynamically influences the topology of the clustered network, thus affects the optimal cluster performance such as compactness and separation of clusters. To eliminate the influence of node mobility, a novel adaptive distributed re-clustering scheme is proposed in this paper. In this scheme, nodes are clustered initially. At each time after that, nodes estimate their current locations and predict the most possible locations of next time. Each boundary node of a cluster periodically obtains location information of the nodes in the neighbouring clusters and autonomously evaluates the optimal cluster according to the information. If a re-clustering process is necessary, the boundary node will switch its assigned cluster through communicating with cluster headers of current cluster and the optimal cluster. The simulation results demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed scheme in increasing the performance on compactness and separation of clusters, and reveal the outperformance of the proposed scheme on packet delivery ratio comparing with existing schemes.