Firefly inspired energy aware cluster based tree formation in WSN

Tree formation in wireless sensor networks is an important phase for a number of functions like synchronization, data aggregation and data transmission. Developing efficient techniques for tree formation has been an area of study in the recent past. Cluster based tree formation is considered to be an efficient solution but almost all the cluster based techniques are either centralized or energy unaware. A firefly inspired energy aware cluster based tree formation is proposed that is decentralized, reduced number of clusters as well as energy aware. The proposed algorithm distributes the cluster head role uniformly among the nodes so that the energy drain factor shall be distributed and no node is completely drained staying as cluster head for longer duration. This process helps the network to stay connected for a longer duration minimizing the partitioning problem and thus increases the network lifetime. The performance analysis of the proposed distributed energy aware cluster based tree formation along with the number of cluster heads for each iteration is presented.