Energy-efficient cluster formation in heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Networks: A comparative study

This paper presents a comparative study of clustering techniques and cluster quality of a single criterion cluster heads election and cluster formation in Wireless Sensor Networks. The HEED, LEACH and Energy-based LEACH protocols are simulated and their performance are compared in terms of the number of cluster head generated, cluster size, cluster head distribution, scalability and coverage. The results of these protocols are presented to show how the cluster formation helps to prolong the network lifetime. We investigated scalability aspects in the presence of advanced nodes in the network and its effect on the network lifetime. We proposed to investigate A-HEED and AE-LEACH protocols, a new approach for cluster heads election that improves network lifetime in the presence of advanced nodes. The simulation shows that having fraction of advanced nodes in the network gives significant improvement in network lifetime as compared with having more homogeneous nodes in the network.