Lifetime Enhancement in WSNs using Balanced Sensor Allocation to Cluster Heads

A wireless sensor network (WSN) consists of a large number of small sensors with limited energy. Prolonged network lifetime, scalability, and load balancing are important requirements for many WSN applications. Clustering sensor nodes is an effective technique for achieving these goals. In this work, we propose a new energy-efficient approach for clustering nodes in WSNs. Based on this approach, we propose a two phase algorithm; in its first phase, cluster heads are selected according to the Sebestyen algorithm. In the second phase, nodes are allocated to the cluster heads so balanced from number of membership view. Two criteria are considered in this allocation. The first criterion is the Euclidean distance between nodes and cluster heads, and the second one is the node degree. The simulation results demonstrate that our proposed algorithm enhances the WSN lifetime significantly in comparison to the weight-based clustering protocols and original Sebestyen algorithm.