Energy-based clustering for wireless sensor network lifetime optimization

Clustering in wireless sensor networks is an efficient way to structure and organize the network. It aims to identify a subset of nodes within the network and bind it a leader (i.e. cluster-head). This latter becomes in charge of specific additional tasks like gathering data from all nodes in its cluster and sending them by using a longer range communication to a sink. As a consequence, a cluster-head exhausts its battery more quickly than regular nodes. In this paper, we present BLAC, a novel Battery-Level Aware Clustering family of schemes. BLAC considers the battery-level combined with another metric to elect the cluster-head. It comes in four variants. The cluster-head role is taken alternately by each node to balance energy consumption. Due to the local nature of the algorithms, keeping the network stable is easier. BLAC aims to maximize the time with all nodes alive to satisfy application requirements. Simulation results show that BLAC improves the full network lifetime 3-time more than traditional clustering schemes by balancing energy consumption over nodes and still delivering high data percentage.