An Energy-Efficient Clustering Technique for Wireless Sensor Networks

In the development of wireless sensor networks applications, how to organize the sensors into a wireless communication network and route the sensed data from the field sensors to a remote base station is a particular challenging problem. In this paper, we present a novel clustering technique for wireless sensor networks. During the phrase of cluster initialization, the sensed zone is divided into several virtual hexagons which it can avoid the overlapping nodes of circular cluster. Furthermore, we make some sub-circle in the formatted virtual hexagon base on the average distance between the common nodes and the cluster´s center. Depending on the special factor´s value, each node will form a cluster heads order list. The clustering technique adopts a new method for cluster head election, which can avoid the frequent election of cluster head. Simulation results demonstrate that our proposed algorithm is effective in prolonging the lifetime of networks.