Energy conservation in wireless sensor network using block cellular automata

Energy conservation is a very critical issue in WSN. A lot of work has been done on the techniques of topology control so that sensor nodes which are not in direct use can be put to a low power consuming state, thus saving energy. Recently improvements have been done in this field by considering individual sensors as individual cell in a grid and applying cellular automata principles to it. Our work uses Block cellular automata, thus considering a number of sensor nodes as a group or block. The grouping or clustering is performed by Grid clustering technique. The member nodes of a block or cluster will select a Cluster Head (CH), which will represent the block as a whole. The CA principles are applied here, by taking a whole block as a single unit and it will decide on the power mode of the CH. Other power conservation algorithms are applied within the cluster so as to increase the overall network lifetime.