An energy-balanced clustering protocol based on dominating set for data gathering in wireless sensor networks

Data gathering is one basic functional operation provided by wireless sensor networks. Most existing clustering protocols suffer from unbalanced energy consumption among nodes, which shortens the lifetime of the network and limits their application in many fields. In this paper, an energy-balanced dominating set based clustering scheme (EBDSC) is proposed to prolong the network lifetime by balancing energy consumption among nodes. In EBDSC, each node calculates the number of potential data gathering rounds it can afford when it acts as a cluster head. The node that can afford most rounds among its neighbors becomes a candidate cluster head. A normal node that is not a candidate head calculates the average number of candidate cluster heads that cover it and broadcasts the value. A candidate head finds the median of the values received from its neighboring normal nodes, and becomes a final cluster head with a probability inversely proportional to the median. Extensive simulations are conducted to compare the performance of EDBSC and a previous work ECDS. The results show that EBDSC outperforms ECDS by prolonging the network lifetime by at most 51.4% as well as guaranteeing full network coverage.