An Energy Efficient Backoff Clustering Algorithm for Wireless Sensor Networks

Since nodes in a sensor network have limited energy, prolonging the network lifetime and improving scalability become an important issue. In clustered sensor networks, clusterheads are responsible for data fusion within each cluster and transmit the aggregated data to the remote base station. As we all know energy efficiency can be obtained by multi-hop communication. In this paper, we integrate the multi-hop technique with a backoff-based clustering algorithm to organize the sensors in wireless sensor network. Based on the energy model in a clustered sensor network, we find the new proposed algorithm is able to significantly prolong system life. By using an adaptive backoff strategy, the algorithm not only realizes load balance among sensor node, but also achieves fairly uniform cluster head distribution across the network. At the same time the protocol incurs low overhead in terms of processing cycles and messages exchanged. Simulation results also demonstrate our algorithm is more energy-efficient than classical ones.