A novel algorithm based on weakly connected dominating set and learning automata and its application to clustering and routing the sensor networks

A wireless sensor network consisting of a large number of small sensors with low-power transceivers can be an effective tool for gathering data in a variety of environments. Prolonged network lifetime and scalability are important requirements for many sensor network applications. Clustering is an effective topology control approach in wireless sensor networks, which can increase network scalability and lifetime. Clustering sensors into groups so that sensors communicate information only to cluster heads and then the cluster heads communicate the aggregated information to the processing center, may save energy. The weakly connected dominating set (WCDS) is very suitable for cluster formation. Then we find a suitable route for sending packets with a new routing algorithm with the help of the created cluster. In this paper, we propose a distributed, algorithm for WCDS construction in wireless sensor networks based on distributed learning automata. To evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm several experiments have been conducted.