A zone-based hierarchical framework and clustering scheme for energy-efficient Wireless Sensor Networks

In Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), sensor-nodes are usually deployed with limited energy reserves in remote environments for a long period of time with less or no human intervention. It makes energy-efficiency as a challenging issue both for the design and deployment of WSNs. A novel aspect of our conducted research is the development of a new Zone-Based Hierarchical Framework (ZBHF) with integrated newly proposed Zone-Based Self-organizing Clustering (ZBSC) scheme for energy-efficient WSNS. The key feature of the proposed solutions is the minimization of energy consumption during the self-organization clustering process to maximize network lifetime. The scheme has been implemented and evaluated in a custom-designed Java based simulator. In the light of the conducted experiments proposed schemes have evolved as a better solution in addressing identified issues in comparison with LEACH, LEACH-C and BCDCP. Furthermore, it consumed less energy in sending sensed data to the base-station with an increased network lifetime.