An Energy-Efficient Clustering Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

In recent years, wireless sensor networks become a new way to obtain information from an interesting area. There are many extensive applications of wireless sensor networks such as environment monitoring, surveillance, enemy tracking, etc. Since the available energy of sensor nodes are limited and hard to renew, energy supervision is critical for nodes and network lifetime in wireless sensor networks. In this paper, we propose a new method to improve ACPM and solve the problem of isolated nodes and to prolong their lifetime. After cluster construction, the isolated nodes gradually enhance their transmission range till finding an adjacent cluster to link. Furthermore, after collecting all data within a cluster, a cluster-head node will assign the most powerful member node in the cluster to forward the data to the base station. Simulation results show that our approach effectively conserves energy for isolated nodes.