Energy Consumption Reduction of Clustering Communication Based on Number of Neighbors for Wireless Sensor Networks

The wireless sensor network (WSN) technology is a key component for ubiquitous computing. In order to achieve the long term operation of WSNs, communication protocols based on clustering have been extensively studied such as LEACH, ACE and HEED. In this paper, we describe clustering communication methods for WSNs. The features of the methods are: 1) the number of neighboring nodes is grasped with less communication overhead and 2) the radius of broadcast is determined based on the number of neighboring nodes. Thanks to those features, each cluster has almost even members and their energy consumption is smaller than conventional methods. We also describe to extend the method to a multi-hop communication version. Further, as a new contribution in this paper, we propose "long-term sleep", which can effectively reduce the energy consumption of the methods presented in [9]. Its basic idea is that, if sensor nodes are capable of covering an area of fixed size, it is sufficient that at least one sensor node operates for every area of fixed size. The effectiveness of the proposed methods are demonstrated by numerical simulation.